Review of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) by Dawdlingpoet — 25 Nov 2021

This is an adventure fantasy film with horror elements and it features themes including hunting, mythology and wilderness. This is, unsurprisingly, quite a quirky watch and I enjoyed it, as it definitely puts a new spin on the family festival to put it mildly. I found myself feeling quite protective of the younger boy character, Pietari from early on.

The plot is quite bizzare to say the least. It definitely has an element of dark comedy to/about it. I find it interesting to see other countries takes, or twists, on Hollywood/Western stories. The plot pace is slow and ardent fans of gory horror will likely be disappointed by little action there is from scene to scene, although there are undoubtedly a few moments which may make you jump but its not choc full of them. The absurdity of the situation kept me watching, with some 'uh-oh' type moments being really quite amusing!. I found the way that some of the plot details came to light to be quite satisfying - it is certainly somewhat of an anti-Christmas film in a sense, a little like Bad Santa.

There is a fairly sinister tone to the film and I'd say its somewhat atmospheric but at the same time, I couldn't quite get myself to feel utterly scared or frightened purely due to the absurdity of the plot. That said, I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy it as clearly I did for its said absurdity. Aspects of the plot are perhaps somewhat Burton-esque, as in Tim Burton but mainly in terms of the genre/themes and darkness to it, rather than therre being a large amount of CGI or a big name cast and the like. Cast wise, the film stars Onni Tommila as the young boy, Pietari Kontio. He stole the show so to speak, with his young somewhat cherubic, innocent looking face trying to deal with the strange situation he finds himself faced with. It would be hard not to feel for him. Meanwhile his father, Rauno Kontio, is played by Jorma Tommila and other cast members include Tommi Korpela as Aimo, Rauno Juvonen as Piiparinen and Per Christian Ellefsen as Riley.

Content wise, this film contains some nudity, including male gentials and obviously a fair amount of violence, which is moderate and not too detailed, mostly only shown briefly but the odd moment may seem a little gory to some and there are bloodied corpses depicted at least a couple of times. There is some strong language shown in the English subtitles, from the original Finnish language but its not constant. There is an almost constant sense of threat which could make viewers scared for Pietari but the darkly comedic side to it means its unlikely people will feel it to be as scary or worrying as it may otherwise have seemed.

The musical score is quite sombre and menacing and I felt did add to the overall tense atmosphere during some of the later scenes, once the absurdity had somewhat died down (I say somewhat, perhaps not entirely). There are some instances of quite well handled cinematography, featuring hoardes of numerous zombie-esque people. I won't say anymore so as not to be giving any spoilers for obvious reasons but I struggle to think how else to review this without mentioning one or two details.

I shouldn't review such a film without making it clear that this is a Finnish film and as such, the dialogue obviously isn't entirely in English (although, surprisingly, there are some instances of English in the script but certainly much less than half) and so, unless you know the language of course, you have to rely on reading the provided subtitles to follow whats going on. This may put you off or not depending on your personal preferences.

In a word, yes. As long as your alright with subtitles and you don't mind a bit of dark comedy then you should find this amusing and possibly somewhat enjoyable, which might sound tasteless but I didn't think it was a film to be taken entirely seriously. There are some instances of good landscape shots aka cinemtaography and I enjoyed watching it.