Movie review site Rotten Tomatoes has ranked the Finnish film Hatching as the 10th best horror-genre movie of 2022.
Director Hanna Bergholm's feature debut, the Finnish-language horror-drama tells the story of a 12-year-old gymnast who desperately tries to please her demanding, image-obsessed mother. One day, the girl finds a wounded bird, and takes its strange egg home, caring for it until it hatches.
The creature that emerges from the egg becomes her best friend — as well as a living nightmare, according to the film's summary on the review site.
Rotten Tomatoes gathers the opinions of both professional and amateur movie reviewers, with films receiving a score between 0 to 100. Hatching had a score of 92 percent as of Monday.
Using a combination of critics' opinions, the site summarised the film as "a message movie in a hard horror shell, Hatching perches between beauty and revulsion — and establishes director Hanna Bergholm as a bright new talent."
The film has received an unusual amount of international interest and rights to show it have been sold in more than 70 countries. It premiered in January of last year at the Sundance Film Festival in the US.
An interview with Yle revealed that the director had grown tired of bland pictures of women in movies and set out to make a horror film in which the main villain is a mother.