Nightborn is the kind of movie that makes you put the popcorn down. Arthur said it best on the episode:
Don’t eat popcorn during that movie in a couple of scenes.
We spent this whole session on Hanna Bergholm’s second feature, the Finnish folk horror hitting Shudder on July 31, 2026, and we came out of it split in a way that felt honest rather than forced. One of us landed at a seven. The other landed at a six. Both of those numbers are true, and the gap between them is basically the whole review.
If you know Bergholm from Hatching, her 2022 debut, you already have a rough map of where Nightborn wants to take you. Same queasy family dread, same interest in the body doing things a body should not do. This one just points the camera straight at first-time motherhood and does not look away.
We saw it as part of our Fantasia coverage, where it played its North American premiere on July 22 at the thirtieth edition of the festival, after a world premiere back in February at the Berlin Film Festival. So this is a real release with real festival heat behind it, not a quiet dump.
The Setup: A House, A Forest, And A Baby That Is Not A Baby
Here is the shape of it without wrecking anything. Saga, played by Seidi Haarla, moves back into the crumbling old house she grew up in, deep in the Finnish countryside, with her British husband Jon (Rupert Grint). They want the perfect family. They get pregnant not long after taking over the property, and we will just say the forest bordering the house has a say in that. As Meaghan put it, “they had sex in the woods, but they’re spurred towards doing so.” The woods want something.
Then the baby arrives, and the baby is wrong. Saga knows it right away. Everyone else keeps telling her the child is fine, that she is the one who needs help, that she is being crazy. She names him Kura, and she never once calls him “him.” She calls him “it,” every single time, and people keep correcting her, and it never lands. That single word choice carries most of the movie’s tension.
If you have seen Rosemary’s Baby, you know the engine here: the mother is the only one who sees the truth, and nobody believes her. Meaghan pulled the sharper comparison though, which is We Need to Talk About Kevin, the Tilda Swinton film about a woman who cannot bond with her own son and spends years being the only person in the room who feels it.
Nightborn runs a similar track, except the thing keeping Saga and her child apart is supernatural, folkloric, pulled straight out of Nordic forest and troll mythology. The whole movie is an allegory, as Arthur clocked early:
Postpartum and what it means to be a first time mother in the first couple of months.
He was paying attention. He wants you to know he pays attention.
What Works: The Space, The Set, And A Cellist’s Score
The best thing Nightborn does is use its physical space to tell you what is happening inside Saga’s head. Arthur’s favorite bit was the tree. When they first walk into the house, the floor breaks under their feet on the very first step, and there is a literal tree growing up out of the middle of the room.
Over the pregnancy, they renovate the place into something gorgeous, and then the tree starts creeping back, rotting the wood, pushing through the floor again. Instead of ripping it out, they bend the branches and tuck them away and pretend it is not there. That tree is Saga, hiding her child and everything she feels about it.
When she finally accepts what is real, she lets the tree grow straight up through the house. It is a smart, patient piece of visual storytelling, and it works because the movie trusts you to catch it without a neon sign.
Meaghan’s number one was the set design itself, and honestly the movie earns it. The early house is a genuine hazard, “multiple code violations,” all danger and rot.
Then you jump forward and land in this enormous round nursery that looks like a living room, all dark green gothic tones and muted grays, with a little cloud light and a hot air balloon hanging over the bassinet for a touch of whimsy the movie has no intention of letting you keep. The forest outside is its own creature. Arthur would “just not go too deep into that forest even during the day,” and the way the trees are built and shot to suggest something watching is one of the most effective things in the film.
The score deserves its own line. It was composed by Eicca Toppinen, the Finnish cellist you might know as the man behind Apocalyptica, and Meaghan flagged it as her number two favorite for a reason. It sits back in most scenes and only steps forward when it needs to, that same gothic-in-the-woods mood the set is chasing. You do not always notice it, which is usually the sign a score is doing its job right.
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Where It Wobbles: Too On The Nose, And One Very Funny Baby
Here is where the six and the seven separate. Meaghan did not fully click with this one, and the reason is that Nightborn is loud about its themes. You go in expecting a slow, subtle folk horror and instead everything is right in your face. There is very little held back, very little to guess at.
Arthur floated a defense that we actually like: maybe that is the point, because:
This is how it is to have a child, like it’s in your face, things happen, you can’t avoid it.
Maybe. We genuinely do not know. It is a generous read, and it might be the correct one, but the movie does not quite earn the benefit of the doubt every time, and a few tonal shifts land funny rather than dreadful.
And then there is the baby. Look, at a certain point the creepy CG infant starts munching on raw meat and growling, and it is hilarious. Meaghan caught herself laughing when she was pretty sure she was not supposed to:
I did find myself laughing a few times when I was like, I don’t think I was supposed to.
Arthur, deadpan: “creepy babies are funny to you.” The little growls and grumbles tip the whole thing sideways for a stretch, and if you cannot roll with a snarling monster infant, part of this movie is going to lose you.
There is also a heaviness worth flagging. This film leans hard into the horror of pregnancy and childbirth, with some seriously visceral body stuff, and Meaghan noted it plays almost like a PSA: “maybe don’t have kids.” Parents, and especially mothers, may find parts of it genuinely rough to sit through. That is by design, but it is worth knowing before you press play.
Seidi Haarla Carries The Whole Thing
Whatever we each scored it, we agree on one thing completely. Seidi Haarla is the reason Nightborn holds together. She carries the entire film, hitting every beat of a woman descending into what everyone insists is madness while she alone sees the truth. Meaghan’s third favorite was that performance, full stop, and Arthur called her work “incredible.” She also gets a whole second layer to play, a strained relationship with her own career-focused mother that quietly rhymes with the motherhood horror in the foreground. It is the kind of clashing-generations detail a lot of women will recognize.
Her chemistry with Rupert Grint is distant, but that is the assignment. Jon spends the movie in denial, brushing off his wife, telling her she needs help, and yeah, he “got on my fucking nerves,” as Meaghan put it, which is exactly the reaction the script wants. Even the baby shower guests are not cooing over how cute the kid is. They are asking, carefully, whether babies are usually supposed to look like that.
So where does that leave us? Nightborn is a folk horror worth your time if you like this corner of the genre and you are up for a hard look at postpartum life, first-time motherhood, and a body that will not stop transforming.
It has beautiful, deliberate visuals, a score that suits every scene, and a lead performance that makes an implausible story feel real. It rushes past a couple of themes it could have sat with longer, and you will have to make peace with a growling monster baby. If you can do that, you are going to have a good time with this one when it lands on Shudder.