Nightborn (Yön Lapsi) Film Review

Nightborn is a bloody, riotous horror film about the unspoken horrors of raising a child, though it feels unfortunately shallow in its conclusions.

Nightborn follows Jon and Sagga, a young couple looking to move to Finnish woodlands to start a family of their own. But their dream of three precious children running through their renovated cabin is quickly upended by the arrival of their firstborn: a blood-sucking, hair-covered, relentlessly hungry baby boy. For Jon, their child is abnormal at worst. To Sagga, he’s the devil – an evil creature from the woodlands whose arrival marks the end of their lives as they know it. 

To start with Nightborn’s strengths: Bergholm is an incredible storyteller, and her latest feature simply proves that even further. The way she uses these characters and their strained relationships to explore the challenges of parenthood that many people won’t speak about is excellent, and her story manages to remain deeply human despite the disgusting body horror and folklore influences woven into it. At its core, Nightborn is a story about maternal deprivation and the inability to bond with one’s child, which is an incredibly common and underrepresented challenge that lots of new mothers have to undertake.

The film offers a very fresh and engaging take on this issue, using this bloodthirsty baby as a clear allegory to represent those who don’t immediately see their child as the infallible center of their universe. However, Nightborn as a film doesn’t quite live up to the potential of Nightborn as a story. There are so many interesting ideas within Bergholm’s screenplay, but the film fails to explore them all to the depth that’s necessary to really leave an impact.

There’s a real sense of dark comedy to the film that definitely manages to make light of a very distressing real-world situation, but it also feels like Nightborn is using humor to divert attention away from an otherwise simple and underdeveloped story. Just when things are getting genuinely dark and horrifying, Bergholm will bring some levity to the situation and have the characters explicitly point out how crazy their lives are, which doesn’t feel particularly necessary or warranted.

There will be inevitable comparisons between Nightborn and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Their stories are remarkably similar: they both offer more cynical, grounded explorations of motherhood and depict how children can often be more of a weight on mothers’ mental health than a blessing. However, Ramsay’s film is ultimately the more effective because it never feels the need to relinquish the audience from its dark storytelling with cheap humor and shock value. It acknowledges that an immersive, unrelenting story is the best way to get its message across, and when it’s funny it rarely feels intentional. Nightborn’s laughs feel slightly manufactured and tangential to the story, padding space where the story’s cracks begin to show.

There’s definitely fun to be had with Nightborn, but for a film that’s trying to be so outwardly allegorical with its storytelling—which this undoubtedly is—it feels quite underwhelming and tonally misguided. It’s committed to a balancing act somewhere between genuine horror and all-out comedy, unsure which side would house its message more effectively, and ultimately committing to neither.

Nightborn (Yön Lapsi) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 14-18, 2026. Read our Berlin Film Festival reviews and our list of 20 films to watch at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival!