Jonathan Sim
Deep in the Finnish forest, a couple’s long-awaited chance at parenthood curdles into something far darker in Nightborn. Saga and Jon relocate to her childhood home hoping to finally start a family, but the arrival of their baby doesn’t bring the life they pictured — it unravels it, turning a quiet domestic dream into a waking nightmare.
The conversation opened with Hanna Bergholm, the film’s writer and director, on where the story’s strange, unsettling language came from in the first place. “Well, Nightborn comes more from real life than from other films, because I tend not to consciously use films as references,” Bergholm explained. “It partly comes from my own experience as being a parent, and starting to think that there are so many emotions — confusing emotions like rage or confusion — and the feeling of being confused about who is this new creature that is being born. So that was kind of the starting point of creating this story.”
That same instinct carried into how Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint, who play Saga and Jon, built their performances. Both are parents themselves, and neither pretended the overlap wasn’t there. “Yes, of course. I think that one couldn’t avoid it,” Haarla said. “I think motherhood is the most — it has the most challenging and educating and giving role and identity of this life so far. So I think it’s a well where you can find everything.”
For Grint, the timing was almost eerie. “As Seidi says, it’s very hard to avoid. I’ve got two,” he said. “And weirdly, when I first got the script for this, we just found out that I was expecting another one — well, my second one. So it was kind of — it felt very, very kind of fated, really, that I should do this.” The birthing scene in particular stayed with him. “I remember reading the script, and particularly the birthing scene was something that I found really kind of triggering, cuz it is just such a terrifying thing. You really don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s quite traumatic. So yeah, it was a journey, but it was a great film.”
There’s an old superstition in filmmaking that you should never work with children or animals — a rule Bergholm broke head-on by building the movie around a baby. Her solution was as inventive as it was unusual. “Since this baby, in various ages, is kind of the central character, there’s only so much you can do with the real baby, and since I also wanted that the baby has a very special way of moving, we used a lot of puppets — kind of robot animatronic puppets that were puppeteered with rods,” she said. “So in the shootings we had Seidi and Rupert and five puppeteers around them in blue costumes, and then there were these various babies of different ages, the real babies.” Working around an actual infant meant staying loose. “With a real baby, you never know what happens. So you have to kind of go with the moment, and hope that the baby does what the baby was supposed to do. If the baby doesn’t, then let’s try another baby. So it was very different working with the real baby and the puppet.”
That physicality carries through the whole film, especially in its final act, where Haarla and Grint’s performances lean almost entirely on the body and the face. “We had a choreographer, Tero Saarinen, from Finland, who — we invented together this dance and the fight,” Haarla said. “It was built — I felt somehow like it came from images, or like pictures that were maybe already from Hanna and Ilia’s plans. But it brought us, with Rupert, quite close to each other, also physically, and getting to know each other already in Helsinki before the filming.”
Grint admitted he wasn’t sold on the idea at first. “When I heard there was going to be like a dance, like a routine, I was quite skeptical, but I always trusted Hannah, and it actually ended up being something that was really useful for the character,” he said. “It lives in this kind of quite heightened way. It was very kind of choreographed and things, but within that, it tells you so much about the relationship, and how we see it kind of decline into this final fight.” The process, he said, became something the two actors could keep returning to. “It kind of forced us to really get up close, and it was really, really helpful, and it kind of guided us throughout the whole journey, really. It was something we could always kind of pull from, and kind of having that eye contact as well — there were lots of scenes where our faces are very close. So I really enjoyed that experience. It was great. I learned a lot.”
No horror conversation is complete without asking what actually scares the people who make horror films, so the question went around the table. Grint didn’t hesitate. “I guess the first time — I think Blair Witch has a special place for me, cuz I remember before even seeing it just hearing about the kind of folklore of people walking out the cinema. My mom and dad didn’t make it throughout the whole film,” he said. “And then I finally saw it, and yeah, it stayed with me. Some of these kind of shake off quite quickly, but that has always stayed with me. There’s so many; it’s a genre that I’ve always kind of been drawn to.”
Haarla’s answer came from a much more repetitive kind of trauma. “For some reason, Nightmare on Elm Street — maybe number five, there were many of them,” she said. “I don’t know why, but we had it on VHS, like video, at home, and for some reason I watched it too many times. It was torture. I was like almost dead, but I still watched it again and again.”
Bergholm’s pick was quieter, but no less devastating for a new parent. “For me, out of films, maybe The Orphanage,” she said. “It wasn’t that scary, exactly, but it was so terrifying because there was this horror of a child being gone missing, and the whole film is about that horror. I had just become a parent when I watched it, and I was kind of terrified.”
The last question was simple: lights on, or lights off? Grint’s answer doubled as a small confession about how horror lingers. “That’s tricky. I’d like a light on,” he said. “And also, after watching a horror movie, I need to watch something like reality TV or something. It does linger on my brain, so I need to kind of reset.”
Haarla’s viewing habits go back to her teenage years and haven’t strayed too far since. “I think the last time I have watched horror films at home was when I was a teenager, and it was this like Scream, Scream 2, and Nightmare on Elm Street,” she said. “And now, when I have been on these fantasy festivals and genre film festivals, it has been really nice to see them in cinemas. That’s a good atmosphere.”
Bergholm, despite spending her career crafting scares, admitted she’s not immune to her own genre. “I like to watch them with lights on, because even though I like to make horrific films, I’m afraid of them myself,” she said. “So I’m protecting myself with a light.”
Nightborn is now streaming on Shudder.
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