The horrors of motherhood play out in full force in Nightborn, the second feature by Finnish director Hanna Bergholm following her much-praised 2022 debut Hatching. Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint star as married couple Saga and Jon, who move into Saga’s childhood home in the woods with plans to start a family. After a lovemaking session deep in the forest where uncanny forces seem to be at play, Saga becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby that’s…different.
It’s abnormally hairy, cries uncontrollably, and refuses to behave—and things only get worse, as Saga spirals into a psychological breakdown. Scripted by Ilja Rautsi and Bergholm, it’s an intense and engrossing viewing experience with a wrenching lead turn by Haarla.
Nightborn is now on Shudder, following its North American premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, where it won the Cheval Noir Awards for Best Film and Outstanding Performance for Haarla—and where Fango spoke with Bergholm, Haarla and Grint.
Hatching was a story about surrogate parenting, in a sense, so how did that lead you to make a film about actual parenting?
Hanna Bergholm: Well, since Hatching was a story told from the side of the daughter, I felt the need to show the other side. Not of the same story, but to tell a parent’s story, about how it feels to have your first child, and how that might change the dynamics in a relationship.
Did you draw on any personal experience?
HB: It’s partly based on my own experience as a parent. When I had my first child, I felt that there were so many emotions, like rage or confusion, that I couldn’t speak about. And also, I noticed how little we still talk about the physical side of motherhood, and what happens to your body after childbirth. I felt that many of those things are such taboos that I wanted to make a film about them. But of course, the movie’s story is fiction!
Seidi and Rupert, are either of you parents, and if so, did you draw on your own experiences for your roles?
Seidi Haarla: Yes, I am a mother, and I wouldn’t know where else I could draw from than partly from my own experiences. But in a sense, those emotions we have as parents, I think every human being has them. Giving birth and being born is something that we all share, and it’s a revolutionary and life-transforming happening.
Rupert Grint: I’m a dad—and in fact, the week I got the script for Nightborn, we had just found out we were having another baby. So I went into this film expecting a baby at the end of it, which was probably not the best thing to do! Because it’s such a confusing and scary time.
Our first baby was born during COVID, and I’m a bit of a hypochondriac anyway, so we had this whole sense of fear there. It’s such a strange creature that suddenly arrives in your house, and it takes a while to work out what it is and how you look after it. So that side of this story really resonated with me.
We don’t see a lot of the baby for a good portion of the film, what was the thought process about how to present it?
HB: It was decided very early on that we wouldn’t ever really see the baby’s face. I wanted to keep the audience wondering, as the parents are wondering, is there something wrong with the baby or not? Everything we see of the baby is a little bit weird, but kind of normal at the same time, so it always keeps that balance where everything is possible and real.
Since I wanted the baby to have a unique way of moving, and there was only so much we could do with the real babies we had, we used many animatronic puppets, with five puppeteers around Rupert and Seidi in blue costumes manipulating them. We had to do take after take after take because it was very technical to shoot with these puppets. When we had the real babies, you never knew what they were going to do, so that was interesting.
SH: It was very different when we had the real babies from when we had the animatronics. When it was the puppets, it was more like grown-ups playing a grown-ups game, and there was this atmosphere of adults playing. But on the real baby days, it was stressful because babies typically shouldn’t be on the set. They’re crying, and it’s a heavy situation for everyone. It’s more random, but it also has to go faster, because you cannot use time in the same way.
RG: I had actually just come off a TV show [Servant] that was also a horror-genre thing about babies and the use of dolls. The real babies, as Hannah said, were very unpredictable. They were kind of the boss, and you had to get what you could with them. But I really enjoyed all the puppets.
It was amazing watching them. There were lots of variants of the animatronic one, and watching them just operate an arm—it was one guy doing only the arm—it was a real performance he was putting in. Coming from the Harry Potter films, you’d expect that I’d worked with a lot of puppets, but it was quite a new thing for me. It was really interesting to watch.
Nightborn is now streaming on Shudder. Watch the trailer below.
