Hannah Bergholm returned to genre filmmaking with Nightborn, which had its North American premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. The film is Bergholm’s second feature and is described as a quasi-English debut following her 2022 Sundance breakout, Hatching.
Premise and principal players
Nightborn follows Saga (Seidi Haarla), who, after a traumatic birth, retreats with her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) to a countryside house inherited from Saga’s grandmother. The film leans into contemporary postpartum horror tropes while threading in Finnish folk elements and uncanny body horror focused on Saga’s relationship with her newborn, referred to in the coverage as Kuura.
What stood out at Fantasia
- Design and atmosphere: The inherited home — and an emphatic green nursery — functions as a character in its own right, with visuals that tie the house to the surrounding land.
- Performance: Haarla’s portrayal of Saga was singled out for its manic intensity; Grint occupies the role of a skeptical husband whose presence is oppositional rather than fully formed as a paternal counterpart.
- Weirdness vs. explanation: The film excels when it embraces fairy-tale oddities and the uncanny, but critics noted that explicit exposition about folklore and vulnerabilities (for example, to iron) sometimes undercuts the mystery.
- Body-horror focus: Physical violations are concentrated on Saga, while the infant is largely obscured on screen, with suggestive details — hair along the back and sunlight aversion among them — used to imply otherness.
Reviewer response framed Nightborn as uneven but provocative: moments of disturbing, effective imagery coexist with more conventional storytelling beats. Comparisons were made to other recent maternal-horror entries and to Bergholm’s earlier work, with the suggestion that the director is a distinctive voice working in a mythic, unnerving register.
Nightborn is scheduled to stream on Shudder on July 31.
Source: Dread Central — ‘Nightborn’ Review: Familiar Yet Unhinged Maternal Horror [Fantasia]