{"id":12469,"date":"2026-07-27T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/?p=12469"},"modified":"2026-07-27T06:41:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T11:41:42","slug":"when-the-nightmare-wont-stop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/when-the-nightmare-wont-stop\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Nightmare Won\u2019t Stop"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>7 Minute, 27 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

MOVIE REVIEW
\nNightborn (Yön lapsi)<\/strong>
\n –  <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre: <\/strong>Horror, Dark Fantasy
\nYear Released: <\/strong>2026
\nRuntime: <\/strong>1h 32m
\nDirector(s): <\/strong>Hanna Bergholm
\nWriter(s):<\/strong> Ilja Rautsi, Hanna Bergholm
\nCast:<\/strong> Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio, Rebecca Lacey, John Thomson
\nWhere to Watch: <\/strong>streaming on Shudder July 31, 2026, shown at the 2026 Fantasia Film Festival<\/p>\n

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RAVING REVIEW: <\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>I loved HATCHING, Hanna Bergholm’s first feature, which makes NIGHTBORN feel more like a frustration than a simple disappointment. Hanna Bergholm’s previous film took body horror, family pressures, childhood anxiety, and creature-feature eccentricity and shaped them into something strange without feeling hollow. It had a real emotional connection under the grotesque imagery, and even when it went big, it still felt connected to the pain it was trying to explore. NIGHTBORN has that same ambition. It has a lot of the same strengths, too. What it doesn’t have is the restraint needed to keep its own discomfort from becoming unbearable.<\/p>\n

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This is a painful film to sit through, and I don’t mean that as an insult in the way it might come off. NIGHTBORN is built to be uncomfortable. Bergholm explores motherhood as a physical, emotional, and psychological rupture, not as a miracle where everyone is happy all the time. The baby’s cry is meant to be invasive. It’s meant to burrow under the skin. It’s meant to put the audience inside Saga’s (Seidi Haarla) headspace and exhaustion as she realizes that the child she has given birth to may not be the child everyone else insists she should love without hesitation.<\/p>\n

I get all of that. I really do. The problem is that the film understands the assignment so much that it overdoes it to the point where the thing the film is trying to focus on starts breaking the movie.<\/p>\n

Saga and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) move into an isolated house deep in the Finnish forest with dreams of starting a family. She has a connection to this place, and the film quickly turns the home into something that feels both inherited and infected. Once their son is born, Saga knows something is wrong. Jon tries to rationalize it. Doctors and family members offer reassurance. The world keeps pressing her toward the expected version of motherhood while everything in her body tells her the truth is darker, stranger, and more primal.<\/p>\n

Like HATCHING, NIGHTBORN uses the genre to talk about things families don’t know how to say out loud. HATCHING dealt with the impossible standards placed on a child, the ugliness hidden under perfection, and the monstrous parts of the self that demand care rather than denial. NIGHTBORN shifts that focus into parenthood, asking what happens when unconditional love doesn’t come naturally, or comfortably.<\/p>\n

The film has great ideas throughout. The house is decaying while Saga and Jon try to build a perfect nursery inside it, which gives the space a strong visual metaphor without needing much explanation. The forest has a cold, mythic presence, not just as scenery but as a force connected to difference, instinct, and something older. The baby isn’t just a monster; he represents a fear every parent is discouraged from saying out loud. What happens when your child frightens you? What happens when your body changes, your relationship changes, and everyone still expects gratitude?<\/p>\n

Seidi Haarla gives NIGHTBORN the kind of performance that keeps the film from collapsing under its heavier symbolism. Saga isn’t played as “crazy,” and that is so important here. Haarla lets her be scared, disgusted, protective, curious, ashamed, and desperate, sometimes all at once. She gives the film a complexity that the script doesn’t always provide on its own. She makes Saga’s horror feel like something deeper than rejection.<\/p>\n

Rupert Grint is solid as Jon, though the role is less satisfying. Jon is written mostly as the husband who doesn’t understand, the father clinging to explanations because admitting the truth would destroy the life he thought he was building. Grint gives him enough warmth and confusion to keep him from becoming an obstacle, but the film belongs to Saga, and Jon often feels trapped at the edge of the real story.<\/p>\n

Bergholm’s visual instincts remain impressive. NIGHTBORN is at its best when it lets the house, the woods, the body horror, and Haarla’s face carry the dread. There are images here that work so well. The practical effects give the horror texture. The mythology angle gives the film more personality than other “evil baby” stories. The connection between motherhood and monstrosity is familiar, but Bergholm approaches it with enough sincerity and oddness that it doesn’t feel empty.<\/p>\n

Then the baby starts crying again.<\/p>\n

This is where NIGHTBORN loses me. The cry isn’t a normal baby cry. It’s not even just an exaggerated horror cry. It’s a shriek, a piercing, miserable, near-screeching audio assault that goes on for so long and returns so often that it starts to feel like nails on a chalkboard. At first, it works. It makes sense. It creates exactly the reaction the film wants. Then it keeps going and going and going. After a while, I wasn’t thinking about motherhood, folklore, body horror, marriage, isolation, or Saga’s inner transformation. I was waiting for the sound to stop. That’s the point where discomfort stops serving the film and starts smothering it.<\/p>\n

A movie can be punishing and still be great. Horror should be allowed to hurt. The issue with NIGHTBORN isn’t that it’s unpleasant; it's that the unpleasantness becomes monotonous. The crying is so aggressive and so prolonged that it flattens the rest of the film around it. Instead of pulling me deeper into Saga’s experience, it pushed me away. I stopped feeling trapped with her and started feeling trapped by the film.<\/p>\n

HATCHING knew how to make something grotesque feel sad, strange, and meaningful. NIGHTBORN has that ability in flashes, especially when it connects Saga’s fear of her child to her fear of herself. There’s a fascinating film here about accepting difference, inherited peculiarity, and the ugly side of parental love. Bergholm isn’t making some empty shock piece. She’s making a personal, ambitious horror fable with real craft behind it.<\/p>\n

NIGHTBORN just doesn’t know when to pull back. It mistakes endurance for immersion, and those aren’t the same thing. By the second half, the audio track becomes the dominant character in the film, louder than the performances, the imagery, and the ideas. That’s a brutal problem for a movie with this much worth discussing.<\/p>\n

I admire a lot of NIGHTBORN. I admire what Bergholm is trying to say, and I admire that she refuses to sanitize or sentimentalize motherhood. Haarla is fantastic, the production design is so strong, and the film has enough imagination to avoid feeling generic. But admiration only carries a movie so far when the experience of watching it becomes miserable.<\/p>\n

NIGHTBORN isn’t bad in the way lazy horror is bad. It’s a much more aggravating kind of misfire. A smart, visually strong, thematically rich film that makes one punishing choice so relentlessly that it overwhelms nearly everything else. I respected it more than I enjoyed it, and by the end, I didn’t feel haunted. I felt relieved that the screaming finally stopped.<\/p>\n

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[photo courtesy of BLUELIGHT (BLUELIGHT NIGHTBORN LIMITED), BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE (BFI), ELOKUVAYHTIÖ KOMEETTA, EURIMAGES, FILMAI LT,GETAWAY FILMS, GLOBAL SCREEN FUND, YLEISRADIO (YLE)]<\/em><\/p>\n

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MOVIE REVIEW Nightborn (Yön lapsi) –      Genre: Horror, Dark Fantasy Year Released: 2026 Runtime: 1h 32m Director(s): Hanna Bergholm Writer(s): Ilja Rautsi, Hanna Bergholm Cast: Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio, Rebecca Lacey, John Thomson Where to Watch: streaming on Shudder July 31, 2026, shown at the 2026 Fantasia Film Festival RAVING REVIEW: I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12470,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/img\/0367\/0367430.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,32,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital","category-fantasia","category-film-festival"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t