A Very Action Movie Christmas: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Dir Jalmari Helander, 1h 22m, 2010)

They do Christmas differently in Scandinavia. Whether it's the bleak darkness of winter, some elemental vestige of paganism, or merely the result of Nordic folklore living on into the modern age, the festive season, from Iceland to Finland, is full of strange traditions and odd, often disturbing figures. Iceland has its thirteen Yule Lads, mischievous pranksters who together with the child-eating Gryla and the curiously specific Yule Cat (who eats people who have not received new clothes before Christmas Eve), reign hell across Iceland over the Christmas period. Sweden has its Tomte, gnomelike figures who look after their respective families and bring them gifts, whilst it and Norway have the Yule Goat, most famous for the colossal (and often burned) example in Galve, Sweden.

And then there is Finland, the purported home of Father Christmas, but also home to the Joulupukki; whilst Sweden and Norway's version of the Yule Goat is largely beneficent, the Finnish version is a far older and less kindly beast, originally demanding rather than giving presents, and though the modern age has blunted it somewhat, the creature remains a dark vestige in the festive period. It's thus fitting that today's film, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, itself an adaption of the short Rare Exports (also written and directed by Helander), in which a trio of Finnish reindeer herdsmen and one of their sons take on a supernatural and suitably festive force unleashed by greedy businessmen manages at once to capture the absurdity and the sincerity of the Christmas action movie like no other film.

Much like the original 2003 short, the mythology of this film goes something like this. Father Christmas is real, and, of course, Finnish; indeed, much of the closing sections of the film are essentially a larger budget remake of the short, with an additional short, "Rare Exports; Official Safety Instructions" setting up much of the mythos, and the rules by which his elves, who essentially replace Father Christmas for much for the feature-length film, operate. Both of these shorts, whilst taking a far more documentary-style format, including narration by Jonathan Hutchings, star much of the same cast, and, both in terms of their cinematography and overall tone, feel more like teasers, prequels to the main event.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, however, starts on a very different tack, with the shadowy work of drillers searching for something in the Finnish wilderness revealling first a colossal layer of sawdust, and then ice, as their leader Riley (Per Christian Ellefsen) slowly, and in a scene that manages to palpably and perfectly increase the tension, reveals exactly what they are digging for, and enacts new rules (cribbed from the Official Safety Instructions) for the workmen. Their work is watched by two boys from the local village, our protagonist, Pietari (played by Onni Tommila) and his friend, the older Juuso, who head back towards town, and to their respective fathers, with Pietari coming across his father, Rauno, one of a trio of reindeer slaughterers, (played by Onni's real-life father, Jorma Tommila), busy at work.

It is this relationship that essentially holds the film together-their bond on screen, of course, between the tough, no-nonsense father and the sensitive intelligent son who is haunted by the possibility of rampaging and dangerous festive forces is aided by them being actual father and son, but they are nevertheless excellent performances, the father exasperated by his son's behaviour, worried by the mounting losses of much of the herd to spooked wolves and, like his son, increasingly scared by the strange turn of events that both find themselves in. It is through the books that litter Pietari's room that we begin to get a glimpse of this disturbing and dark version of Father Christmas, depicted in frightening woodcuts, as the credits roll, as a colossal horned beast that punishes children with a birch, before eating them.

From here, the film begins to gather pace. Whilst Pietara begins to dread the 24th of December, taping and eventually stapling the date shut, Rauno and his colleagues, Piiparinen (a perpetually sunglass-wearing Rauno Juvonen), the father of Juuso , and Aimo, (Tommi Korpela) set out to the drilling site, finding only a colossal hole, and no sign of the personnel that originally dug it. Here, the film begins to lean into the horror elements-there are undeniable comparisons, what with the oppressive cold and the darkness of Finland, to John Carpenter's The Thing, from its tight, occasionally claustrophobic filming to the oppressive darkness that closes in around.

This escalates quickly once the wolf traps that Rauno sets up around his homestead reveals not a wolf but an injured naked man in a squeamish inducing scene where the clever cinematography of Mika Orasmaa manages at once to reveal the damage the brutally sharp wooden spikes have inflicted and to cover up the constraints of the film's 1.8 million Euro budget, the camera instead focusing upon the blood and feathers around it. Panicked both by the discovery, and the illegal nature of this spike-driven pit, as well as the disappearance of Pietara, who has an altercation with his father over his fear of the oncoming Christmas Eve, so Rauno brings Piiparinen in to investigate the mysterious, and presumed dead figure.

It is here that the film nimbly changes tack, adopting the tonality of a slasher movie, as, whilst the adults discuss what to do with the naked figure, after the shocking discovery that he is still alive, so Pietera rings for the other children in the village, crossing their names off one-by-one as he calls their parents to find they are not home, the tension rising to an explosion of violence as the old man is taunted by Piiparinen with gingerbread and suddenly attacks, tearing off his ear. The trio reform and interrogate the figure, in a tense, beautifully shot sequence where Peeter Jakobi, who plays the lead elf, truly shines as a cruel, predatory figure. It's a scene stealing performance without a line of dialogue, his eyes glinting in the dark, his stance dangerous. It is a sequence where, despite for all intents and purposes he is a naked old man, there is a complete and almost disturbing lack of vulnerability.

Realising that these children have all disappeared, and beginning to realise that the supernatural forces he feared are behind it, Pietera begs his father to punish him, but this is interrupted by Piiparnen and Aimo. The naked man is growing in power by the moment, and the appearance of Pietera sees him go positively feral, leaning into the dark undertones of the slasher movie. With the sudden interruption of the Americans, and the return of Riley, so a plan is hatched to pass this strange naked man off as the Santa that Riley has been looking for, and the quartet rolls towards the film's superb finale, in which the film once again changes tone, its showdown against Santa Claus and its forces not only riffing off the finale of action horror movies such as Aliens and Predator, but also, unmistakably, echoes of the resourceful Home Alone in Pietera's plan, which, of course, leads to the big-budget ending of the film, complete with spectacular reveal, chase, and recreation of the original short on massive scale.

There is, undeniably, a charm to Rare Exports, a film that manages to walk that tightrope between its bizarre, outlandish premise and its grounded depiction of such; buoyed up by the quality of its performances, and its central duo, its beautiful cinematography, and its veritable sense of location, as the oppressive darkness of the Finnish winter presses in, full of snowy vistas, dark forests and looming mountains. It may be made on a budget a fraction of any other film this month, but as few other Christmas action movies do, it merrily balances the seasonality, even this darkly reinterpreted Finnish version of the season, and the action in a brisk superbly taut film that nimbly hops between comic and violent, between jolly and bloody.

As a small handful of films have done over the year, Rare Exports:A Christmas Story is a superbly made antidote to the schmaltz and saccharine seasonality of so many Christmas movies.

Rating: Must See