Sundance Film Festival is absolutely killing it with its horror selections! Following are capsule reviews of two absolutely bonkers, can’t-miss features.
Hatching
Finnish/Swedish coproduction Hatching (Ruva, 2022) finds pre-teen gymnast Tinja (Siiri Solalinna in a captivating debut performance) trying to live up to the expectations of her domineering mother (Sophia Heikkilӓ), who vlogs about the wonderful life of their seemingly perfect family. Naturally, the online presence is merely an illusion, as evidenced earlier on when Tinja captures a bird that flew into their house, only to see her mother break its neck. Soon after, Tinja finds a bird’s egg near her home, and promises to take care of what will hatch from it. Big mistake, what with this being a horror film. It would be a shame to go into too many details here about Hanna Bergholm’s astonishing directorial debut Hatching, so suffice it to say that there are some amazing creature and body horror effects on display of both the practical and CGI variety, and that the film, scripted by Ilja Rautsi, delivers both a wickedly warped take on modern family drama and a large amount of creepy, mesmerizing fright fare. My advice is to avoid watching the trailer below and to go in as cold as possible to Hatching to let it weave the full effect of its twisted insanity on you.
IFC Midnight presents Hatching in theaters and digital/VOD on April 29, 2022.
Resurrection
You’ve likely never seen a protagonist perspire as much as Margaret (Rebecca Hall) in writer/director Andrew Seman’s Resurrection (2022), and she has good reason to do so as she tries to protect her teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) from a man named David (Tim Roth), who Margaret ran away from more than 20 years earlier. If you think this sounds like a set-up for just another run-of-the-mill thriller about a single mom protecting her child from a stalker, you couldn’t be more wrong. Seman takes the film to mind-jarring places while putting Margaret through emotional and physical wringers, and Hall is more than up to the task, putting on an absolutely jaw-dropping performance as a woman who loses her psychological grip as she heads into darker and darker territory. Roth’s performance as the manipulative antagonist is also something to behold, and Kaufman is solid as the confused daughter who is distraught at her mother’s shocking behavior. Seman delivers a taut horror thriller with one of the most insane third acts in recent memory.
Hatching and Resurrection screen as part of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, which runs online January 20–30. For more information, visit https://www.sundance.org/.
