🎬 Hatching (2022) – Full Plot Summary (English)
Tinja is a 12-year-old girl living in a seemingly perfect household with her mother, father, and younger brother. Her mother is a former gymnast who now runs a family lifestyle vlog, obsessively curating their lives for public admiration. Everything must look perfect — including Tinja.
Tinja trains daily as a competitive gymnast under her mother’s strict guidance, though the pressure weighs heavily on her. One day, a crow crashes into their living room and causes chaos. Her mother kills it with her bare hands. That same night, Tinja discovers the injured crow in the woods and, feeling pity, kills it to end its suffering. Near its body, she finds a strange, mottled egg, which she secretly takes home.
She hides the egg in her bed, nurturing it like a child. The egg grows rapidly to a massive size — clearly unnatural. Eventually, it hatches into a grotesque, birdlike creature. Instead of being horrified, Tinja feels a strange maternal connection to it and hides it in the attic.
She names the creature “Alli.” As time goes on, Alli begins to mirror Tinja’s emotions, especially her inner rage and repression. When Tinja is jealous, upset, or feels threatened, Alli acts out violently on her behalf — killing a neighbor’s dog, attacking her gymnastics rival, and even harming others close to her.
Meanwhile, Tinja’s mother begins an affair with a handyman named Tero. Tinja, disturbed by her mother’s hypocrisy, becomes more emotionally unstable. As the bond between Tinja and Alli deepens, the creature begins physically transforming into a twisted doppelgänger of Tinja — more human, more like her twin.
Tinja struggles to keep Alli secret while dealing with the weight of her mother’s expectations, the growing violence, and her crumbling sense of identity. As the chaos escalates, Tinja realizes that Alli is the embodiment of all the pain, anger, and suppressed emotions she has been forced to hide.
In the climax, Alli becomes fully human-like, resembling a more primal, unfiltered version of Tinja. A final confrontation between Tinja, Alli, and her family leads to a tragic ending, suggesting that when emotions are repressed too long, they take on a life of their own — often destroying everything around them.
🎠Themes:
- Parental control and perfectionism
- Repression of emotions
- Identity and duality (light vs. shadow self)
- Motherhood, trauma, and toxic expectations
