She runs a family blog. Every post shows the perfect home, the perfect marriage, the perfect daughter. Her followers do not see that her twelve-year-old is upstairs, secretly raising a monster.

HATCHING (2022) is the debut feature of director Hanna Bergholm. Its original title, PAHANHAUTOJA, means "hatcher of evil" - a play on a Finnish phrase for nursing a grudge, letting something bad incubate until it grows too large to hide.

Tinja is a gymnast straining to be flawless for her image-obsessed mother. She finds an egg in the woods, brings it home, and keeps it warm. It grows. What climbs out is a human-sized bird-thing bonded to her, and it begins acting on every ounce of rage a "perfect" girl is forbidden to feel.

The creature was built as a physical animatronic by Gustav Hoegen, who worked on the recent STAR WARS films, with makeup by Conor O'Sullivan of THE DARK KNIGHT. Young Siiri Solalinna, in her first role, plays both the girl and the thing she hatches.

Screenwriter Ilja Rautsi initially pitched a story about a boy and an evil doppelganger. Bergholm changed the child to a girl, and this creature feature became one of the sharpest films ever made about the public performance of a happy family.