Country:
Finland
Recognizable Faces:
Ville Virtanen
Tommi Ertonen
(I'm sure you know them right?)
Directed By:
Antti-Jussi Annila
I know what you're thinking. No, this movie doesn't have any displays of male promiscuity. Sauna is a Finnish horror movie with a pair of balls so big, they can only be conceptual. It's dark, it's smart and it doesn't try to take any shortcut. Result? It's a terrifying look at the main casualty of war: the human soul. Also, it's awesome.
The story is set in 1595, at the end of a 25 years war between Russia and Sweden. Captain Erik Spore (Virtanen) and his brother Knut (Ertonen) are mandated on the Swedish side, to team up with a Russian company to trace the new frontier in between both countries. If I understood well, back then, Finland was just a province of Sweden. Erik, a rugged and paranoid military (who's ironically wearing glasses), happens to kill a peasant he suspected of treason on the eve of their mission. He also left his daughter to die in an underground granary. It's one too many murders when you're about to walk into a haunted forest.
Yeah, but what about that damn sauna right? According to the folklore over there, taking a sauna is a symbolic gesture for washing away your sins. You take it with newborns to wash away past lives and with men that are about to die. Erik Spore has a lot of things on his conscience. He's a career warrior and he's wrestling with the idea of peace. It doesn't make any sense to him. As the company walks into a surreal village where every peasant is clean and a strange sauna appears in the middle of nowhere, there are some things that will need to be accounted for.
It's not the most accessible movie. It's slow paced, subtitled and in a strange, old-time Scandinavian parlance. Passed that, I don't have any other complaints with the movie. The forest is a moody settings and the director takes its sweet time, he makes you simmer in the evil broth of human sorrow. Personal drama and tortured characters are a sign of quality in horror. There's no monsters or rent-a-scare here. There's a "physical representation" of sorrow and regrets, but nothing you can say "here's a ghost" or "here's a vampire". Sauna is a movie about the true nature of horror: the inner depth of human psyche.
I dare you to watch Sauna, whether you're an horror fan or not. It's a beautiful, breathtaking and smart movie. Your actions will end up defining you somewhere along the line before you tattle off the coil. Sauna examines the inner-self of a guilty conscience. It's short and bulky enough to keep you enthralled.
SCORE: 94%
