Most critics lean favourably on Bergholm’s follow-up to Hatching, though few are wholehearted about it. The praise clusters on Seidi Haarla, whose performance as Saga is described as raw, forceful and guttural by more than one reviewer, and on the film’s black-comic handling of its gore. Deadline also singles out the unsettling sound design and Rupert Grint’s patronising Jon, and several reviews find the folk horror grisly and oddly cathartic.
The reservations gather around the parenting metaphor, which several critics find repetitive, and around a folk-horror plot most consider predictable, with too few scares or laughs to carry it. The spread is wide. The Guardian is the clear outlier at the bottom, calling the film a disappointing retread of Hatching and finding the comedy unfunny, while Eye for Film goes furthest the other way, reading it as an angry, astute film about the dismissal of women’s testimony.