Seida Haarla and Rupert Grint are Saga and Jon, who have moved back to Saga's home country of Finland to start a family, with plans for three kids; specifically they've moved into her grandmother's run down house, its generous land filled with broken down vehicles and machinery. She's given up work for five years to make their child rearing plans happen; he's negotiating a new career in a foreign country.
Saga has grown up 'in nature' (to use an annoying phrase) whereas Jon has been uprooted from the UK and seems a lot more down to earth. They wander in their new country environment, full of fairy tale trees that look like people, and make love outside; a blunt cut confirms that seed has been sown with a close up of their new baby being born, blood covering an attentive Jon.
The birth is not without problems, leaving Saga bruised and bloody, and their little offspring is unusually hairy. "This is where it all begins," says Jon when the family return home, and he's not wrong; the baby, whom they're going to christen Christian (after Jon's father), aggressively latches during breastfeeding, cries all the time, and wears down the parents. So far, so newborn; add in Saga's brusque mum who criticises her daughter's tendency to romanticise life ("You look tired," she says to Saga in possibly the least welcome observation ever) and her sister Taru (Pamela Tola) whose pretty daughter and well scrubbed image contrasts with Saga's post birth knackerdness, and you have a recipe for an extremely stressful household.
But things get worse; the baby, now named Kuura in a surprise announcement by Saga at a family do, seems incredibly sensitive to sunlight, burning on exposure, and prefers darkness. More baffling, he seems to have a physical aversion to cold iron. Much of Bergholm's film is concerned with the rift between the parents, Jon's distant, patronising manner contrasting with Saga's desperate attempts to mother her child in a normal way and, when realising Kuura's more basic instincts, abandoning all traditional childrearing techniques in favour of pacifying her newborn.
Nightborn is ultimately unsuccessful because its equating of the stresses of new parenthood with the mysteries of the forest is too clunky; performances, particularly the supporting cast, verge on the parodic, and the balance of horror and domestic drama is uneasy. As a mother on the brink, almost from the first frame, Haarla is convincing and sometimes deeply affecting, but Grint's Jon doesn't have the heft to match it. Too often Bergholm's film pivots around too thin a premise, making the drama repetitious and, considering the fantastic elements, often rather hollow. Disappointing.
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