Were Steven Spielberg to replace the San Fernando setting of E.T. with a rural Finnish house doused heavily in Cath Kidston-inspired pastels, while reimagining his homesick alien as the manifestation of a 12-year-old girl’s repressed vengeful impulses, it might look something like new film Hatching. It’s the debut feature from director Hanna Bergholm: an equal parts familiar and bizarre coming-of-age tale about a young girl who nurtures a mysterious egg with suitably gruesome consequences.

Despite being light on genuine frights, the film, penned by screenwriter Ilja Rautsi, deals in some weighty ideas about womanhood. Startling newcomer Siiri Solalinna stars in what gradually becomes a striking dual role, playing the timid gymnast who hatches something monstrous in her bedroom when she finds an egg in the woods one night. Of course, the doppelganger narrative is nothing novel in horror, but here it is given a nifty contemporary twist as Tinja (Solalinna) navigates family life with a spiteful younger brother (Oiva Ollila), a passive father (Jani Volanen) and an overbearing mother (Sophia Heikkila on wonderfully wicked form) consumed by her relentlessly upbeat vlog series entitled Lovely Everyday Life. 

That the gooey-feathered monster – birthed tellingly from Tinja’s tears – eventually comes to resemble her gives Hatching its shrewd double meaning. The arrival of the creature, nicknamed ‘Alli’ after a creepy children’s tune, comes to not only represent the horrifying physical manifestation of the fury Tinja increasingly struggles to supress, but also serves as a neatly observed satire of the artifice and faux perfection of the social media age. 

With meditations on conformity, parenting and puberty thrown into the mix, to mine such rich thematic depths across an economic runtime means many of Hatching’s ideas as a film feel disappointingly underdeveloped. Crucially, though, Bergholm and Rautsi give their central characters just enough complexity to render the lines between victim and villain suitably blurred. That, coupled with the fine animatronics work of Gustav Hoegen and SFX makeup brilliance of Conor O’Sullivan, makes for a satisfyingly dark, contemporary fairytale that has plenty on its mind. 

Dir: Hanna Bergholm (15, 91 mins)

Hatching is out Fri 16 Sept

words GEORGE NASH