A reflection on identity, motherhood, and the uneasy gap between feeling and expectation.

The opening of Nightborn (Yön Lapsi) is peaceful and even adventurous. A happy couple, Saga and Jon, is about to build their own little nest in a remote house deep in the Finnish forest, far away from everything. I could relate to it immediately. I’ve had similar thoughts. During the pandemic, I considered changing my life completely and moving to the countryside. I shared their desire to leave the chaos of a big city behind, to disappear somewhere quiet, to build something that feels entirely your own.

It’s also a familiar cinematic pattern. We’ve seen stories like this before. A grandparent or some distant relative dies, leaving behind a house. Then a person or a couple arrives with the intention of restoring the house and building their perfect family there.

Saga grew up in this house with her grandma. She seems more at ease here and more comfortable in the forest rather than among people. Nature accepts her as she is, without any expectations, the need to explain, or to perform the role that society places on her.

We see her imagining a child’s room. She wants to recreate something from her own past—shared memories with a sibling, the image of a rocking horse, something familiar. I find myself, from time to time, returning to my own childhood in a similar way. Thinking about how great it would feel to gather around the kitchen table again, with an updated family, to celebrate a birthday or a holiday. The memory of a plastic New Year’s tree in our house is especially strong. I can even picture it in different corners of the room, each version belonging to a different year, gently overlapping in my memory.

When the child is born, everything becomes unclear. The film never fully settles into one perspective. You start to question what you’re seeing, whose perspective is that. Is there really something wrong with the child? Are you experiencing everything through the mother’s perception? And if that’s the case, how reliable is she as a narrator?

The reactions of the people around Saga and Jon only make it worse. Friends and relatives come to visit, they celebrate, they observe—but there’s always something slightly off. The mother is caught between two instincts that don’t align. On one side, the need to protect her own child, but on the other, in her eyes, the child is strange, to say the least. And that’s where the real tension kicks in, since the film never clearly tells you what is real.

Even the most basic and natural act – breastfeeding – is unsettling. The child’s behaviour feels exaggerated. And that’s the horror of it. What makes Nightborn so difficult to watch isn’t the suggestion that something might be wrong with the child. It’s the possibility that nothing is “wrong”. The film takes motherhood and a mother’s bond with a baby that we treat as sacred, unspeakable, invisible, and asks: “What if it isn’t always like that?”

I don’t have a child yet. I don’t know what it feels like to care for somebody who is completely dependent on you, and at the same time, who is their own self. I didn’t experience postpartum depression. But the film didn’t feel distant—it still reached something in me.

What do you do in the moment when you realize you are becoming someone you don’t recognize? What if you slip into a role that you don’t feel is fit for you, but everyone around you insists it is natural? And this panic inside of you: “Why doesn’t this feel the way it’s supposed to?”

We don’t talk about the jobs we thought we wanted that slowly hollow us out. The relationships that look right from the outside but feel strangely misaligned from within. The versions of ourselves we step into, only to realize—too late, or too gradually—that they come with a kind of erasure. But you are the only one who senses that something is wrong. You begin to question not just the world around you, but your own perception of it.

In Nightborn, Saga’s experience is constantly measured against an invisible standard she cannot meet. The more she fails to embody it, the more isolated she becomes. On top of that, her own mother wasn’t the greatest example of a nurturing mother either.

We’re told that certain emotions will come naturally. That love, fulfillment, certainty—they will arrive on cue. But what happens when they don’t? When the timing is off, or the feeling never quite lands?

That’s why the movie stayed with me.

Because beneath everything else, it feels like a story about inheritance—not just of places or roles, but of emotional patterns that are far less visible. The ways we learn what care should look like, what love should feel like, and how easily those ideas carry forward through generations.

Because it quietly dismantles the idea that there is a correct way to feel. That there is a natural sequence—event, emotion, fulfillment—that unfolds predictably if everything is “right.” The movie suggests something far less comfortable. Experience and expectation don’t always align. And the gap between them isn’t necessarily a failure.