Review: Nightborn – “Motherhood at its most Visceral & Animalistic”

A young married couple finds love and a future in a new isolated home. a pristine and quiet forest surrounds them as they build their lives and rebuild their new domicile. A home and a hearth can only protect you so much from the spirits that surround. And the surrounding forest has those in droves.

Making love in a naturalistic way angers or excites the stillness of the trees and nature, cementing this couple love, but perhaps also their fate. Pregnant and expecting, Saga “Seidi Haarla” starts to notice tones and feelings, which her husband Jon “Rupert Grint” writes off as hormones and jitters from an unsuspecting mother.

Soon their baby is born, but something is amiss, because this child cries like a hungry beast and shares many other traits like excess hair and mannerisms to make even the best nurse ask questions. Safety is not guaranteed when raising the wild and questions of motherhood vs reality make choices equally simple and sickening.

This film is equally twisted suspense and a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Do you take what you have been given or cull your mistakes. Grint plays a great self-imposed blind father that wipes away and questions. The real weight in this film though is being lifted by Seidi Haarla. Her motherhood to madness is a story written across her face and we see changes and horrifying choices unfold. The ending of this film is less a culmination of story and more a deliverance of a sin.

Nightborn Movie Trailer

Story: With dreams of starting a perfect family, Saga and her British husband Jon move to the isolated house where she spent much of her childhood, deep in the Finnish forest. As their marriage starts to crack, Jon struggles to support his wife, but only Saga suspects the disturbing truth about her new-born.