Naughty but nice

When it comes to Christmas movies, Finnish filmmakers don’t mess around

Let’s face it: Christmas is a time of wonderful movies with uplifting messages, earworm music and bright-as-tinsel endings. Which is why it’s good to have the Finns around to help keep things in perspective.

The feature debut of writer/director Jalmari Helander, 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is dark and funny — and absolutely, positively, definitely not for the kids. You know how, in the classic 1983 movie A Christmas Story, all Ralphie wants is “a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time?” Well, in Rare Exports, 10-year-old Pietari gets handed a real rifle by his father, no questions asked, after a field of bloody animal carcasses suggests something not so jolly is on the loose in the Far North.

Pietari is played by Onni Tommila, the director’s nephew and also the star of 2014’s Big Game, opposite Samuel L. Jackson. Ahead of the rest of the children and adults in Rare Exports, he figures out that Father Christmas — who hails from Finland’s Korvatunturi mountain — needs to be stopped before he can cause any trouble.

Remember that before Clement Clark Moore and Coca-Cola tamed the figure, the sinister-sounding Sinterklaas enjoyed kidnapping bad children (and shaking them in a sack) even more than delivering presents to good girls and boys. In this movie, when a potato farm is ransacked and robbed — of the sacks, not the potatoes — things look grim indeed. Fortunately, Pietari has a good head on his shoulders, and immediately puts a bear trap up the chimney.

If you want to know if Rare Exports is right for you, you can find Helander’s 2003 short of the same name online, as well as 2005’s Official Rare Exports Inc. Safety Instructions. If you like what you see, track down the feature-length version and have a very merry, scary Scandinavian Christmas.