Nightborn review: Rupert Grint raises a monster baby in Finnish forest horror

Rupert Grint stars in Nightborn, a Finnish horror about new parents whose baby turns out to be a bloodsucking troll — and it falls well short of director Hanna Bergholm's 2022 debut Hatching, according to Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian.

The film pairs Grint's stolid British husband Jon with Saga, played by Seidi Haarla. The couple move into Saga's dilapidated family home in the remote Finnish forest. They plan to renovate it into a place to raise a big family. In the review's dry estimate, such a renovation would in the real world take a couple of years while the owners lived elsewhere; the film has them manage it largely unaided in about two weeks.

What goes wrong in the woods?

Saga responds to the setting with visceral intensity. The Guardian review describes her as "obscurely moved and excited by the vital subterranean forces throbbing in the dark depths of the forest that surrounds the house." The couple have passionate sex there. The resulting child is not what they hoped for. The baby, in the reviewer's words, is "a brutal, hirsute, bloodsucking troll that destroys Saga's marriage and happiness."

Bradshaw's verdict is unsparing. He calls the film "programmatic and unsubtly acted," a scary movie about a monstrous newborn that is "very much less interesting and original than Hatching." He faults its cliched paganism. He also finds the black comedy — "so often the alibi for not being scary in films like this" — simply "not all that funny."

How does it compare with Hatching?

Bergholm's debut Hatching, released in 2022, earned a far warmer reception. Bradshaw praised it then as "a witty and unnerving baby-body-horror movie" centred on a creepy giant egg, and as "a complex, psychologically plausible study of family dysfunction in which the idea of fertility plays an important part." Nightborn returns to those same themes of fertility and family breakdown. The reviewer frames the new film as a retread rather than a development.

The creature itself receives a pointed criticism. The face and body of the screeching VFX devil-baby are mostly withheld from view. Bradshaw argues this omission does not read as unsettling but rather as "an admission that this prop wouldn't look convincing in plain sight."

The takeaway in plain words: a promising director's second feature recycles her first film's ideas with weaker craft, weaker jokes and a monster the film itself does not dare show. For Bergholm, whose debut marked her as a distinctive voice in body horror, Nightborn reads as a step backward — one that will make her next project the truer test of her trajectory.