Not a bad Shutter movie. Creepy babies along with highlighting the drama and horror that can come with childbirth for a mother is a tried and truth method, if not overdone. It can be used to symbolize the many different griefs that parents go through in this new part of their lives. In many cases, the mother is usually picked out as the victim while her partner slowly drifts away with misunderstanding until the climatic moment.

There’s not too much to unpack here. Couple have sex in the woods, have baby, they discover something very weird with baby, couple fight in trying to understand their baby and then the final reveal. Yes, not revealing the baby’s face is a very effective and creepy way of cranking up the tension and atmosphere. One of those scenes in the beginning creeped me out a bit. But other than that, there’s not much scare in Nightborn. For that, you’d likely have to unravel and unpack the movie to determine what it symbolizes. For viewers that are just watching this movie at face value, I think they’d come away a bit disappointed.

I think the movie did a pretty poor job and presenting the lore to explain away Saga’s terror baby and for pretty much why everything is happening. It’s one of those things that happened so quickly that if you missed it, you’re likely going to be confused in the end. With Nightborn, I can only assume that Saga’s attractiveness to the forest during her childhood somehow attracted the spirt of the forest. Or put another way, the trolls. We only got wind of this from a line or two from I believe Saga’s sister. The trolls part we learned, again from a line or two, from Jon’s parents when they came to visit. If you missed this, the ending would not make much sense. The forest and/or trolls clearly claimed the baby as their own. We learned that it never smiles throughout the movie. Once the forest came alive in the end to claim it, we finally get to see the baby’s face for the first time and what do you know, he’s smiling.

This is clearly not one of those stories where it’s all in the mother’s head. We know for sure that the baby was definitely born with an oddity as other people around Saga can confirm as well (the hair thing on the back). We can confirm it dislikes direct sunlight as well as when it got hurt grabbing the poker that was a gift from Jon’s father, a priest. We can confirm that it only likes to drink blood. Jon saw this himself towards the end. Oh and it clearly bit off the finger of Saga’s niece. So no, this isn’t just “happening” due to Saga’s “trauma of childbirth”. I just wished for a more better storytelling method of why it’s happening, you know, the lore behind this. If I had missed a couple lines, as mentioned earlier, I would have also been stumped. Like yes, we know there’s something evil with the forest but again, why? It tries to be sneaky, mysterious and dark at the same time but not really doing anything well. Maybe Saga belongs to the forest trolls as well seeing how messed up she turned out in the end? She loved the forest so much in her childhood so maybe now she gets to do it all over again with her baby. I thought maybe the baby name of Kuura might provide some hints? But no, I didn’t get anything from it other than maybe it’s supposed to reference the forest somehow and I just don’t understand it enough?

Kuura primarily means frost, rime, or freeze and is of Finnish origin. 
It is a unisex name that evokes the serene, crisp beauty of winter landscapes and is exceptionally rare outside of Finland.