Once upon a time, there was a lonely house in the Finnish woods... Thus begins “Nightborn” (Finnish title: Yön Lapsi, English: Child of the Night, Finland, Lithuania, France, United Kingdom 2026), a horror fairy tale that director Hanna Bergholm directs with great effect. Saga (Heidi Haarla) and her English husband Jon (Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films in his youth) drive through a dark forest until they reach the dilapidated house where Saga used to spend her summers with her grandmother. Full of exuberance, they conceive a wanted child in the soft moss.
The pregnancy is already difficult, and the birth is a rather bloody affair. By now, we suspect that this will not be a story about a happy little family. The baby looks like a hairy monster and behaves like one too. It rips off its grandmother's earring, bites its mother's breast until it bleeds while breastfeeding, and is generally quite violent. The father decides that it is time to ‘give the baby a proper education’. But little Kuura (Finnish for “hoarfrost”) smashes the jar of baby food over his father's head during his first attempt at education. It prefers raw, bloody meat.
In her second feature film, the Finnish director consistently plays with elements of body and psychological horror. The seemingly happy nuclear family becomes a domestic hell, in which the man ultimately will fall by the wayside. But first, nature strikes back and puts all civilisational efforts in their place. Rarely has postnatal stress and trauma been portrayed so dramatically on screen.
There is also a touch of horror in “Rosebush Pruning” (Italy, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom 2026), which is categorised under the labels ‘Queer’ and ‘Family is complicated’. Karim Aïnouz's film begins with a voice-over narration by Ed (Callum Turner), who introduces his strange family. This immediately arouses suspicion, because it seems that the film does not work on the basis of its images but needs some extra explanation. Ed tells a hair-raising story: how, at the insistence of their mother, the family moved from New York to the Catalan coast, where only a statue at the entrance to the house reminds them of her, as she was allegedly torn apart by wolves. In their memory, the rest of the family deposits half a lamb at the site of their death every Tuesday, and as if on cue, the wolves appear and devour their prey.
Anyone who finds all this strange is right, because later we find the mother (Pamela Anderson), who was presumed dead, in a posh villa, where she now lives in lesbian harmony with her former gardener (Elena Anaya). Before that, she blinded her husband (Tracy Letts) with her flashing teeth, and since then he has been practising a very unusual tooth-cleaning ritual, in which his son Jack (Jamie Bell) has to assist him.
Jack wants to break free from his family ties (Berlinale category ‘Families are complicated’) and start a new life with his lover Martha (Elle Fanning). But first, his gay brother Robert (Lucas Gage), who is incestuously fixated on him, has to get rid of their blind father and his sister Emma (Riley Keogh). This almost would have worked, if he hadn't been struck down by an epileptic seizure and Emma hadn't stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife, just to be on the safe side.
The whole plot is pretty nonsensical and ends in an extended splatter finale. Well-meaning critics celebrate the film as a grand metaphor for the perversions of the super-rich (Epstein sends his regards) and cannibalistic capitalism. In fact, it's more likely to be a form of high-end trash with a star-studded cast that looks like it wants to parody the Berlinale's ‘queer’ label to the extreme.
Both films can be understood as metaphors for universal themes. While ‘Nightborn’ tells of postnatal trauma with a certain humour, ‘Rosebush Pruning’ underscores the view with shock effects that are sprinkled in at random. This comes across as just as pretentious as the showy cast, without really succeeding in characterising the individual characters.