Nightborn

It’s rare that the quality of a film is apparent right from its opening shot, but Nightborn, which won the Cheval Noir for Best Film at Fantasia 2026, brings such gorgeous depth of field and richness of colour to the forest we drive through to reach its primary location that many viewers will be instantly beguiled. We are going home with Saga (Cheval Noir Best Actress Seidi Haarla) and John (Rupert Grint). It’s Saga’s childhood home. John has never been there before, but immediately finds it enchanting, despite the broken staircase and the tree growing through the nursery floor. It’s where they plan to settle down and raise three babies.

John is one of those very straightforward, common sense Englishmen who is kind and affectionate and deeply supportive as long as life proceeds according to a pattern he understands. He is a little unsettled by the ancient forest with its trees which seem to have faces, a dugout structure with a dark interior and midges hungry for his blood. Saga makes sport of it, jumping out at him, then shows him how the forest echoes if one shouts. This is where she used to play as a child, she explains, in a place where her grandmother forbade her to go, warning her “The forest takes its own.”

Everything shifts between the couple when their baby is born. Saga struggles to bond with him, but when she talks about her difficulties, she’s treated with patronising reassurance, dismissal and disapproval by John, medical staff and a range of relatives. This is sadly a common experience for women suffering from post-partum psychosis, which can seriously endanger their children, but is that what’s going on here, or is there a different issue? Saga’s mother, with whom she has a strained relationship, comments that Saga herself was a difficult baby.

Writer/director Hanna Bergholm walks the line with skill. The baby doesn’t like having his tummy touched. Does he just have a touch of colic? He doesn’t like bright light, but might have some sensory defensiveness, an expert suggests. The first thing to unsettle Saga is his hairiness, but that’s not uncommon in babies born a little early, and it passes, as one would expect. He cries a great deal, and there’s an aggressive tone to it, but is that just Saga’s interpretation of it? John doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with the boy. Saga is clearly distressed by commonplace unpleasant matters associated with childbirth and breastfeeding, so it’s easy to believe that she might not be fully rational. The real tragedy is that whether or not she is correct in the claims that she makes, she’s clearly not getting the help she needs.

“That’s nature,” laughs John’s mother when he’s puzzled that a weed has situated itself in one of his garden beds. “You can’t control it.” Yet as Saga struggles, his grip gets tighter. Is it really her he wants to hold onto, or his sense of normality? Bergholm’s images of clinics and neat domestic spaces are deliberately prosaic. As things break down and we find ourselves increasingly in contact with the wild, the extraordinary beauty of those introductory shots returns. There’s a persistent hint that Saga’s difficulty lies not in accepting the baby, but in doing so on John’s terms. Even if they have never felt it to such an extreme, many mothers will relate. The cliché that new mothers struggle when attention once given to them goes instead to their offspring is replaced by an understanding that parenthood can also precipitate a reevaluation of the self.

Sensitive, astute and refreshingly angry, Bergholm’s film gives space to the forgotten, embracing horror and even the fantastical as a means of reevaluating normative social ideas. It’s exquisitely crafted and seeks not to surprise, but rather to ask why we are so quick to reject women’s own testimony about their lives, about their nature.

Reviewed on: 29 Jul 2026