The horror movie Hatching puts the most hideous face on a familiar nightmare

polygon.com:

The Polygon team is reporting in from the all-virtual grounds of the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival, with a look at the next wave of upcoming independent releases in sci-fi, horror, and documentary film.

The opening act of the Finnish horror film Hatching may give Black Mirror fans traumatic flashbacks. The striking episode Nosedive sears an aesthetic of pink-and-pastel perfection into viewers’ brains as the face of Instagram influencer respectability. Then it builds up a sense of dread around that kind of artificiality, and a distrust of the hidden labor and equally hidden motives involved in creating it. Hatching starts in a similar place, with a blissfully perfect family of four curating their lives around carefully composed, strategically framed social-media posts. But the film gets much darker than Black Mirror, goes much faster, and reaches much bloodier ends.

Hatching is yet another vicious satire of online culture in an age that’s increasingly finding traction with them. The 1980s were full of horror movies built around the wholesome Norman Rockwell image of suburban life, and the seamy underbelly it sometimes disguises. But that brand of horror has mostly morphed into movies like Cam, Spree, and The Hater, warning about what’s under the surface of a social-media identity, and what happens when people use the internet to chase approval at any cost. Hatching couches that familiar warning in a metaphor so simple and obvious that it almost seems ridiculous. But the extremity of what director Hanna Bergholm puts onscreen strongly counterbalances any sense that the message is too facile.

Twelve-year-old Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) seems to have been raised as an accessory to her mother’s video blog, Lovely