In this Finnish horror, 12 year-old Trinja (Siiri Solalinna) is desperate to please her demanding, lifestyle obsessed, mother (Sophia Heikkila). When, she finds an egg, she takes it home and looks after it until it hatches. The emergent creature is horrifying to look at, but Trinja bonds with it, naming it Alli. Over time it begins to mutate into something that increasingly looks like Trinja but with a malevolent personality.
After last week’s Crimes of the Future, this is another body horror movie. I think it works much better than Cronenberg’s film, largely because it starts with a recognisable and relatable situation. Trinja’s family seem unduly chirpy but reasonably normal to start with, although her mother is a hideously pushy online influencer. But as the movie progresses, the cracks begin to show in the seemingly ideal life that the family leads.
There are some extremely gruesome moments that require a strong stomach and two very tense sequences as one of Trinja’s friends and then her mum’s lover’s baby are imperilled by the monster. Solalinna is remarkable in her dual performance and Heikkila is, at times, as scary as Alli is! The ending feels appropriate, though quite easy to predict.
Rating: 7 out of 10