The Little Pakeha

Hatching (Pahanhautoja)

2022, directed by Hanna Bergholm

Hatching is a movie that I can genuinely imagine being used to teach film analysis in high school English. I know it’s not actually in English, but unless the rules have changed that doesn’t disqualify it – after the comparatively insipid The Sixth Sense in fifth form my class studied La Vita e Bella in Italian in sixth and the German language Lola Rennt in seventh, meaning I was taught film analysis using majority movies that were not in English. I’ll leave it up for speculation as to whether spending weeks dwelling on a historical tragicomedy and a weird experimental alternate timeline… thing… had any influence on my taste in movies.

At any rate, we’re back to mothers and daughters with this one, but with a whole lot of other things thrown in like society’s perpetual terror of pubescent and adolescent children (particularly girls). There’s really only one explicit reference to puberty where Tinja’s father goes to confront her about her behaviour but spots a bit of blood on her sheets, and coming to the conclusion that she’s gotten her first period he reverses course entirely. But the whole film is basically a metaphor about it, with Tinja essentially moving from childhood to motherhood in the hatching of “Alli” and the way her whole life becomes about caring for this strange, messy creature who manages to subsume her own identity and who she can’t help but love even as it destroys all her familiar routines. “But… I hatched it,” she says helplessly at one point, not long after raging at Alli that, “I don’t want you! Nobody wants you!” She is, of course, far too young to handle the contradictory emotions of unexpectedly becoming a mother – she can barely handle her own emotions most of the time since she identifies herself so much as simply an externalised part of her own mother. Dressing like her, keeping her incredibly inappropriate secrets, taking on her values and goals. She spends most of the movie so anxious she looks like she’s about to burst into tears at any given moment, and while there are signs that she knows full well that she’s not good enough at gymnastics to keep her mother happy she just keeps kicking that can down the road.

Let’s move from motherhood back to puberty though, because at the same time Alli is an expression of Tinja herself, an expression that’s capable of having her own wants and needs and acting to get them. It’s no coincidence that the same young actress portrays both of them. Alli’s actions might not benefit Tinja in the medium or long term, or even really in the short term, but they’re a reaction to her feelings of fear and of not being good enough or of being replaced because of it. Puberty is a time when children struggle to keep their feelings in check, when their actions don’t make sense to anyone around them and often to themselves as well. It can be easy to see them as, well, monsters. Why else would it be such an enduring theme in horror movies? For all the talk of the terrible twos and the subsequent development of a child having their own personality, puberty is the first time children really become unfathomable and uncontrollable, when even one that’s formerly been pressured and pounded and forced into a desired shape will start to scream and rage and break out.

If anyone’s interested in watching this one I will note that there’s a serious emetophobia warning for a couple of scenes, but it’s relatively fleeting. It’ll depend how sensitive you are to it.

Cheap distracting games

Sometimes it’s hard to stop doomscrolling. One thing that can help is having something else to focus on, like video games! I’m not exactly the most tuned in to the industry, but I follow enough variety content creators to know of a pretty decent range of games that are easy to get caught up in and won’t cost too much money.

Note that I’m not sponsored, receiving any kickbacks, or have investments in any of the people behind these games, so I have absolutely no conflicts of interest. All prices are in NZ dollars because that’s what Steam shows me even when I’m logged out – for US prices, halve it and then add a little, or maybe just click on the link and see what it is exactly.

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Hellbender

2021, directed by the Adams family

A fun thing about Hellbender is that it was created by a married couple, John Adams and Toby Posey (to clarify, Toby is a woman) and their two daughters Zelda and Lulu. Zelda and Toby play the two main characters and Lulu the main supporting character, while John and a bunch of other people they presumably hired the normal way fill out the rest of the cast. That’s kind of awesome.

Hellbender is a story about mothers and daughters and all the complicated things that go on between them. Its depiction of magic is an interesting one – magic comes from fear of death, something possessed by every living thing, even a worm, and it fills their blood. If you consume the blood, you consume the power. The proxy-ness of it reminds me a little bit of Daughter of Smoke and Bone in which magic comes from pain, and generally speaking the pain is represented by teeth. Baby teeth, in that canon, give only tiny amounts of power because they don’t hurt much to come out, they’re designed to. Adult teeth give more. And for real power you skip past teeth entirely and create pain another way. Unlike Daughter of Smoke and Bone though, Hellbender depicts the magic as specifically dark, which is a major part of the push and pull between Izzy and her mother. Blood ties them together, something that represents both life and death, and as it turns out you can’t ever entirely separate them.

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