28/49
I am a bit conflicted about how I feel about this film
Narrative
It tells the inspiring story of an abused single mother who works for a small town newspaper and who becomes involved in the investigation of the missile incident, which turns life upside down in a small northern village. It is based on a real case from December 1984, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile strayed from the Barents Sea across the border of Finland and crashed in Inarijärvi. The recovery of the found missile in January 1985 was eventually covered by a large number of international media.
However, the development of the missile story itself was very long and often quite boring
On the one hand, I think it would be too dry to have a film solely about this missile incident, especially considering that the only settings available should always be this frozen Lappi countryside and the various dark inland areas. Therefore, the (rather predictable) idea of combining it with a family drama was the one they went with. The lead character was wonderfully acted and the strongest part of the film was its depiction of domestic violence and how adults can almost develop two personalities when talking to children or other adults.
He’s great in this and his simple one-on-ones with Oona Airola are probably the best moments we get
The choice was to make the military unlikeable and Lapin Uutiset the underdog, but again without the kind of “push” from those main characters, we got bogged down at a snail’s pace. I haven’t seen much Finnish cinema yet, but Hannu-Pekka Björkman seems to be in every Finnish film ever made. The interaction and bewilderment when these hopeless alcoholics meet for the only time in their lives with the BBC bigwigs, that kind of stuff was really enjoyable.
But there’s not enough of it
I didn’t know this was a true story (at least the missile part) until a Wikipedia search the day after watching it. Like most flawed historical films, it doesn’t have enough of a hook and relies too much on the kind of angst (in this film’s case, nuclear angst) that I simply didn’t feel as a viewer. Therefore, the choice to build suspense was not the right one and I think a shorter, sweeter film that cut the long “people sitting in meetings” and “people having meaningless conversations in the shower” scenes (even though the Väyrynen joke was good) would have been much stronger.
However, despite all my criticisms, there are plenty of laughs and our two main protagonists have great chemistry on screen
But this is Finnish cinema, there MUST be 30 minutes of the film dedicated to people talking inconsequentially (or not at all) in meeting rooms. The metaphorical duality of dangers at home and dangers to the world was well written and acted, it just needed better editing.
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