A festive comedy-horror from Finland

Bored of the festive season? Bored of mince pies and cold weather? If you’re looking for something different this season, you need not look any further than this Finnish film about an ancient child-eating devil Santa, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, which has been slated as this year’s premier festive-comedy-horror.

It’s the week before Christmas and young Pietari uncovers the truth about Santa Clause: far from the Coca-Cola invention of red suit and bells, Santa is in fact a two-horned fiend, preying on the young and naughty. Over the course of this film’s bizarre events that sees a 400-strong reindeer herd lying bloodied in the snow, mysterious disappearances of children, and American scientists excavating an ancient mountain, Rare Exports keeps you guessing. Humour and suspense are handled well in this seasonal story, and you’ll laugh as you’re treated to one Christmas cliché after another.

Seven years ago Jalmari Helander made a short internet viral about smugglers hunting Santa Claus, following up in 2005 with another. The success of these two shorts has led to the financing of this fantastically inventive feature. Coming from these roots, however, the film is predictably flawed, by just being too damn long. At 82 minutes, the run-time is unfortunately asking too much of this one, albeit brilliant, idea: the characters and plot line just don’t quite fill up the time. That’s not to say that the film is dull. It packs a fair punch of jokes and scares, with the first half featuring a good selection of harrowing scenes and touching moments. The comedy is of the deathly black variety with a few one liners, building to the final, climatic scene involving a helicopter, a reindeer pen and a lot of explosives. A personal favourite scene is when Peitari’s father catches a ‘Santa’ in a home-made wolf trap and proceeds to interrogate him.

One of the great aspects of the film is that it examines our ridiculous sensationalisation of the Christmas period. Gingerbread, Christmas lights, presents – anything you can think of to do with the modern consumerist Christmas is highlighted in this film and ridiculed. It’s not an uncommon gripe about Christmas, but this film brings the point subtlety home. Overlooking the fact that the running time is slightly too ambitious we can take away some interesting ideas from this film and have fun whilst doing so. I urge you to do something a bit different this year and give this off-beat Finnish film a try. Even if you don’t like horror films, this is a great example of modern independent film-making driven by rare originality.