Nightborn film review: Troll baby horror is a real slog

Nightborn | Director: Hanna Bergholm | ★★☆☆☆ The best horror movies often remind us how incredibly gross it is to be an organic creature. British-Finnish production Nightborn revels in all the terrible functions of the human body: the blood and the guts and the secretions that we pretend are not the very fabric of our being. The mental veil we drape over our troubling physiology is perhaps at its thinnest when we are making and rearing children: growing them, squeezing them out, suckling them. Ew. Around this theme Nightborn crafts a darkly funny allegory exploring the tribulations of new motherhood, with a particular focus on postnatal depression and postpartum psychosis. (The filmmakers couldn’t have known that the latter would become such an internationally discussed topic thanks to the trial of Lindsay Clancy, but it makes Nightborn feel chillingly relevant.) We follow young-ish couple Saga and Jon (Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint) as they arrive in a new home, having reloc