Nightborn Review: Grint Stars in Shudder's Motherhood Horror
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- Hanna Bergholm directs "Nightborn," co-written with Ilja Rautsi and now streaming on Shudder, following her 2022 film "Hatching" with a story that swaps jump scares for maternal ambivalence
- Rupert Grint plays Jon, an oblivious English father whose rictus grin during his wife's nightmare childbirth evokes Ron Weasley, and who asks if the baby "looks like a Christian" while suggesting his priest father bless it
- Seidi Haarla stars as Saga, who delivers a hairy, werewolf-like infant named Kuura that rips open her vagina, chews her nipples, and cries every time she approaches
- The couple relocates to a rotting childhood home deep in the Finnish forests, where Saga's Scandinavian relatives refuse to acknowledge anything is wrong despite Kuura's biblical allergy to purified metal
- Review finds the film "half-works in spite of itself" — long on dream imagery and moldy skin makeup but short on scares or jokes, with Bergholm's ambivalence between literal horror and metaphor handcuffing the narrative
- The film ultimately argues that "everyone feels like they're dehumanized by the process," ending on the suggestion that Saga "would do it all over again" — a portrait of motherhood absent any pronatal platitudes
Why it matters: Bergholm positions "Nightborn" between the progeny-from-hell mishegoss of "Rosemary's Baby" and the everyday exhaustion of "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," with Haarla's raw, bleeding performance carrying the film's central question about why nobody is allowed to admit parenthood is monstrous. For Shudder's horror audience, it adds a thematically ambitious but uneven entry that trades conventional scares for a sustained meditation on maternal ambivalence.
