Nightborn | 2026 Berlin Intl. Film Festival Review
Only Mothers Left Alive: Bergholm Tackles Motherhood Malaise
Finnish director Hanna Bergholm adds to the subgenre of motherhood body horror with Nightborn (Yön Lapsi), an arguably more contained palette than her 2022 debut Hatching, which similarly dealt with female body image expectations and dysfunctional kinship roles. Her latest feels more like situational comedy, whereby a woman’s ‘madness’ is triggered by a couple’s move to an isolated, dilapidated family home in the eerie thickness of a fairy style primed Finnish forest. Settling into a familiar groove, it’s a film wherein the idiosyncratic wavelength’s success depends solely on the increasingly untethered lead performance from Seidi Haarla, who certainly throws herself admirably into full tilt weird.… Read the rest
