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(Fantasia Fest 2026) NIGHTBORN (2026): When Motherhood Turns Into a Nordic Nightmare

By. Radek Velicka 

Republished with permission. Original article can be found HERE

Hanna Bergholm follows Hatching with another strange horror fairy tale.

Motherhood has almost become a horror subgenre of its own in recent years. Childbirth, postpartum depression, the loss of one’s identity, the social expectation that a woman must automatically love her child, and the gradual alienation from her partner and those around her have all become increasingly common subjects in horror films.

During this festival season alone, I have already come across several films exploring similar themes. And shortly before NIGHTBORN, I also watched Mutter: The Diary of a Mother at Fantasia, which similarly combines motherhood, isolation, and body horror into an unsettling whole. Maybe that is why NIGHTBORN did not manage to surprise me quite as much as it probably wanted to. That certainly does not make it a bad film.

Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her British husband Jon (Rupert Grint) move into an old family home deep in the Finnish forest. They want to renovate it, start a family, and build their own little idyllic world far away from the city. But their vision of perfect parenthood begins to fall apart almost immediately after the birth of their son.

Saga becomes convinced that something is wrong with the baby. Jon and everyone else see nothing unusual, while her increasingly desperate behavior is attributed to postpartum problems. The more Saga insists that her child is not normal, the less anyone around her believes her.

 

When a Mother Stops Belonging to Herself

Director Hanna Bergholm keeps the audience almost entirely on the side of her protagonist from the beginning. While developing the film, she also drew on emotions connected to her own experience of motherhood and was particularly interested in things that are rarely discussed openly – fear, anger, exhaustion, the physical consequences of childbirth, and the uncomfortable gap between what a person is actually experiencing and how society expects a new parent to feel.

This is where the film works particularly well. NIGHTBORN is not so much a film about an evil child as it is about a woman who feels as though she no longer belongs to herself. The baby demands her body, her time, and all of her energy, while everyone around her expects her to be happy. And if she is not, then naturally the problem must be with her.

Jon mostly comes across as someone who genuinely wants to handle the situation rationally but simply has no idea what his wife is actually going through. The more he tries to help her in the way he believes is right, the more isolated she becomes. The film also captures quite effectively how easily the people around someone can convince them that their own experience is not real.

Rupert Grint is likable in this role, but the film belongs primarily to Seidi Haarla. Her Saga gradually transforms from an excited mother-to-be into an exhausted and frightened woman, eventually becoming almost like a wild animal defending her territory. It is a highly physical performance, and Haarla communicates much of Saga’s emotional state before the film ever needs to explain it through dialogue.

 

Tim Burton Gets Lost in a Finnish Forest

The old wooden house surrounded by endless Finnish forest gives the film a wonderful Nordic atmosphere, while what begins as a domestic drama gradually transforms into a dark folkloric fairy tale. Bergholm draws on the cruelty of old European fairy tales and the idea of the forest as something ancient, alive, and entirely indifferent to human beings. At times, I felt as though I were watching something Tim Burton might have made if he had wandered into a Finnish forest instead of a Gothic mansion.

As with her previous film Hatching, Bergholm also relies heavily on practical effects, prosthetics, puppetry, and animatronics. That gives the baby, as well as some of the film’s later grotesque imagery, a physical imperfection that is far more interesting than polished CGI. Some sequences even have an old-fashioned creature-feature quality, and these are precisely the moments when NIGHTBORN manages to stand apart from many contemporary horror films.

The problem is that beneath its beautiful Nordic surface lies a story we have already seen in many different forms.

The Babadook, Baby Ruby, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Die My Love, Mutter, and of course Rosemary’s Baby long before any of them all use pregnancy, children, or motherhood in some way to explore fear, exhaustion, alienation, and the loss of control over one’s own life. Bergholm herself even remarked while developing the film that her story, in a sense, begins where Rosemary’s Baby (1968) ends.

So while NIGHTBORN may feel original in the specific form of its monster and in its Finnish folkloric setting, what it ultimately wants to say is much less surprising.

Its metaphors are also often very direct. The mother feels as though her baby is draining the life out of her, and the film almost literally shows us that. The people around her do not understand her experience, so they convince her that the problem exists primarily in her own head. She feels herself slipping away, and that transformation gradually becomes not only psychological but physical as well.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. I simply had several moments when I felt the film was explaining something I had already understood twenty minutes earlier.

Fantasia’s Grand Prize Winner

That makes NIGHTBORN’s enormous success at Fantasia all the more interesting. It won the Cheval Noir Award for Best Film, the top prize in the festival’s main international competition. Seidi Haarla also received the award for Outstanding Performance. Considering the competition among this year’s genre titles, that is a major achievement and confirms that Bergholm’s combination of horror, dark fairy tale, and the uncomfortable emotions surrounding motherhood resonated much more strongly with the jury than it did with me.

And I can understand why. On a technical level, the film is very accomplished, Seidi Haarla is excellent, and above all, its Nordic fairy-tale aesthetic gives it a distinctive identity. If this were the first story I had seen about motherhood, alienation, and the gradual loss of personal identity, I might have been far more impressed.

 

Despite some reservations, I still enjoyed NIGHTBORN quite a bit. It has several genuinely bizarre scenes, a welcome streak of black humor, an excellent lead performance, and above all an atmosphere that at least visually distinguishes it from most films exploring similar themes. It is not a horror film that scared me, nor one whose ideas stayed with me long after the screening. But as a strange Nordic fairy tale about the possibility that the long-awaited child may not be quite the miracle society has always promised you, it works.

From parenthood to childhood, Fantasia offered some particularly strange visions of family this year. In HOME BODIES, Radek Velicka explores a very different domestic nightmare, where two children grow up inside a home controlled by an unseen parental authority and begin discovering that its rules may not exist for their benefit.