NIGHTBORN (YON LAPSI) movie poster | ©2026 Shudder

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio, Rebecca Lacey, John Thomson, Silvia Saloranta, Max Cavalera
Writers: Ilja Rautsi & Hanna Bergholm, story by Hanna Bergholm
Director: Hanna Bergholm
Distributor: Shudder
Release Date: July 31, 2026 (streaming on Shudder)

NIGHTBORN (YÖN LAPSI) is a great companion piece to its director Hanna Bergholm’s previous film, 2022’s HATCHING. Both are dark fantasies about motherhood and supernatural beings. But where HATCHING was from the point of view of a teenager dealing with her mother at the same time she becomes a surrogate parent to a forest creature, NIGHTBORN’s protagonist is a new mother whose infant is not what she was expecting.

We meet wildly-in-love newlyweds Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) as they prepare to move into Saga’s childhood summer home. This is a sprawling old wooden fixer-upper in the middle of a Finland forest (NIGHTBORN was actually shot in nearby Lithuania). Plants are growing up through the floorboards and there’s a lot of metallic junk in the front yard, but Saga and Jon are undeterred.

Saga, who is Finnish, and Jon, who is English, both want a family with three children. They get started on this in the woods near the house, where the trees grow with what look like distorted human faces in their trunks and clutching fingers extending from their branches.

We cut from passionate lovemaking to the hospital room where Saga is giving birth a bit (but not dangerously) early. The little boy is healthy, if unusually hairy, and Saga is so weakened by her ordeal that she comes home on crutches.

While Jon is insistently optimistic, Saga is having some problems. Some come from the baby, who draws blood when he feeds; some come from her impatience with Jon; some are clearly her own, like her hit of calling her child “it” instead of “him.”

When Saga’s distinctly unmaternal mother (Pinkko Saisio), sister Taru (Pamela Tola) and young niece Anna (Silvia Saloranta) come for a visit, we and Saga get a large clue as to what may be occurring.

Director Bergholm, who co-wrote the screenplay from her own story with HATCHING screenwriter Ilja Rautsi, excels at playing a variation on the common what’s-going-on-here game. Since we’re seeing things from Saga’s viewpoint, we tend to buy into her suspicions. However, the film makes us understand how easily Jon and everyone else can be so sure that Saga is having psychiatric issues.

And indeed, something is going on with Saga beyond her ambivalence about baby Kuula, who infuriates her but who she also says she cannot be without. Haarla’s performance encompasses everything, from ardor to shame to irritation to feral rage.

Grint provides staunch support as a man increasingly desperate to do the right thing by his wife and son, if only he can figure out what that right thing is.

While most of the characters in NIGHTBORN speak fluent English, Jon doesn’t speak Finnish. This works as a metaphor for stilted communication, but it also makes us want to know a bit more than we get about the characters. Yes, the spine of the film is the interpersonal dynamic, but what is Saga giving up to become a parent, and what is Jon doing in Finland (and what kind of job does he have) if he can’t speak the language?

We also wind up with a few mythological questions, but it would be spoilery to lay them out here.

Mostly, though, NIGHTBORN draws us into magical riff on the vagaries of caring for a newborn, punctuated by bouts of horror, with some beguilingly imaginative visual flourishes.

In English and Finnish.

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