Heralded as “A message movie in a hard horror shell,” by Rotten Tomatoes; 2022’s debut film by Hanna Bergholm is… anything but. Or, if it is, the message is so transparent as to be missed entirely, or so opaque as to require an explanation from the director. While certain themes are clear and pushed to the front of this “message movie”, they are not involving, strange, or ethereal enough to really matter. A movie about the pressures of familial expectations and finding your unique identity, Hatching never quite seems to land on any one branch long enough for anything to evolve.

We follow young Tinja, a gymnast amid a family of 4, and she has a big competition coming up! Trying her best to impress her plastic-wrapped mother so as not to break her social media facade, Tinja’s grasp on her skills isn’t quite up to snuff… for said mother anyway. It’s a tried premise that still has plenty of potential in the tank. In the age of social media, more and more young people [and old alike] find themselves caught in the loop of “perfection” that our constant bombardment of highlights from other peoples’ lives creates. Before I get too high on the concept, however, it’s important to introduce our other characters.

Also featured in the film are Mom [as previously mentioned], a social media influencer; Dad [insert adjective for blank character writing here], and her younger brother, Mattias, a jerk. Additional characters include: “Neighbor girl Reetta” who has a dog and is better at gymnastics than Tinja, and “mom’s boyfriend Tero” who [comically] is the only character with any dimension… and also enjoys the least amount of screentime. You now know every character in the film, and everything there is to know about them.

Hatching tries to be profound with its comments on bulimia, the plastic face Tinja’s mother wears all the time, and the narrative surrounding the antagonist “other” that Tinja accidentally creates. Where it goes wrong, is not developing any single idea into something meaningful and, instead, leaving them all to flounder like so many baby birds that have fallen out of their nest. This leaves the movie complacently transparent and boring while it tries again and again to create a meaningful narrative experience. The harder it tries, the harder it pushes you away. By the end [by about 20 minutes in if I'm totally honest] I was so disconnected from the narrative and emotional threads being pounded into my eyes that I couldn’t see Tinja or her “other” as anything other than a poorly written horror-comedy. For all the weight of its concepts, it seems the film was placed on a trampoline for us to enjoy their rebounds rather than force us to endure their steadfastness.

All-in-all, Hatching certainly isn’t the worst debut film I’ve ever seen, and I wouldn’t turn my nose up at the director’s future work. I also, however, wouldn’t go out of my way to see them like I would Prano Bailey-Bond’s [Censor] or Remi Weekes’ [His House] because, at the end of the day, Hatching is just the made-for-TV version of Black Swan, and not a piece worthy of remembrance or praise outside of the impressive production value given to the creature.