An ooey, gooey suburban creature feature about motherhood and maintaining the illusion of perfection, Hatching expertly blends the weirder side of horror with a deeper message. Motherhood – at any age – requires great sacrifice. It’s often nasty, inglorious business. Hatching is not elevated horror. Nor is it shlock. Instead, this Finnish import about a newly hatched bird-human hybrid pulls from E.T. and Troma films, utilizing great practical effects to pluck at ideas of puberty and motherhood.

The picture perfect Finnish family’s home life is first disrupted when a crow comes crashing through their bay window. Flapping its way through the house, likely smashing every bit of glass it could find. The unnamed matriarch played by Sophia Heikkilä, a Mommy vlogger with ridiculously high expectations for her offspring, breaks the birds neck when she gets her hands on it.

Tinja, played with welcome precision by newcomer Siiri Solalinna, disposes of the crow but later takes a dreamy Pet Sematary-esque sojourn into the woods where she finds the crow still barely alive. Suffering. She puts the rook out of its misery in unexpectedly brutal fashion, smashing it over and over and over and over again with a rock until it finally stops squawking. When Tinja discovers the deceased fowl’s (cursed) egg, she decides to take it home and raise it at home. Fowl play cometh.

First-time director Hanna Bergholm‘s film then transforms into an anxiety-wracked game of hide and seek. Tinja’s egg grows massive, hatching into a bizarre bird-human hybrid that comes to resemble Tinja. The animal calls itself Alli and can’t satiate its hunger save for trying out the neighborhood dog and nearby babies. As Tinja navigates the stress of competitive gymnastics and her parent’s (rather amicable) separation, Alli becomes her avenging id, striking out at those who challenge Tinja’s place in the world.

Drawing from all sorts of influences – doppelgänger drama, extraterrestrial family movie, murderous creature feature – Hatching doesn’t settle showing off its fanciful plumage, digging deeper than its (admittedly awesome) surface level genre appeals. Beneath its feathered exterior lies a mischievous allegory for the terrors through puberty and entering womanhood. One that just so happens to also feature a giant bird transforming into a little girl.

CONCLUSION: Hanna Bergholm’s audacious horror debut ‘Hatching’ channels the anxieties of a young Finnish gymnast on the brink of puberty through a ‘Brothers Grimm’-type story about a cursed egg and human-bird monster. In simplest possible terms – this horror story of fowl play rules the roost.