Review: Rare Exports — A Christmas Tale 2010

This film has to be among the most original, it’s a Finnish horror-comedy, and it’s really quite extraordinary. The comedy is extremely dry, so dry that, coupled with the fact that the dialogue is in Finnish (with subtitles), it can be difficult to tell that the film is intended to be funny. See, when I watched it, I wasn’t aware that “Rare Exports” is a horror-comedy, so after the viewing, I was left feeling rather perplexed about what I had just seen…but after I learned that the movie is supposed to be funny, it made a LOT more sense and, thinking back, it IS funny, very funny! You just need to understand that that was what the filmmakers were going for. Without realizing the film is a comedy, it just seems twisted and bizarre..and just wrong.... then, once you take the comedic intention into consideration…well the movie is still bizarre…and still twisted..but, for me, at least, that sense of “wrongness” disappears, and the whole film becomes so much lighter. Not to say that there isn’t still a ‘darkness’ to the movie as well, it is a horror-comedy, after all.
“Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale” takes place in a poor town in Finland and focuses on a peculiar and heroic little boy named Pietari. Pietari lives with his father, Rauno, in a small shack in the mountains; Rauno scrapes by, by hunting reindeer and selling the meat… but this year something has gotten to to all the reindeer first and mangled their carcasses beyond salvage! Rauno and his men blame the wolves, or more specifically, they blame a team of British archaeologists who have been digging and drilling and exploding on a neighbouring mountain, for upsetting the wolves’ habitat and driving then into some sort of frenzy. What Rauno and his friends don’t know is that the archaeological team are excavating something…and, whatever it is, it’s big. Pietari, however, has a very different theory about what happened to the reindeer, he has been doing some research (or, at least what passes for ‘research’ when you’re nine) and believes that the team have unearthed the real Santa Claus…and he’s nothing like the jovial “Coca Cola Santa” of modern-day beliefs. When the children of the town go missing on Christmas Eve, Pietari believes his theory has been confirmed, now it’s up to him to save his friends, perhaps even the world, and make sure that, this year, Santa does not come to town!
“Rare Exports” is truly fantastic, it receives high praise from 90% of critics, and could actually be considered a holiday classic. It’s funny, but the humour is very satirical, and also so utterly dead-pan, you may have to remind yourself not to take the film too seriously. “Rare Exports” is a clever commentary on commercial Christmas and on the nature of mankind in general. Absolutely recommended to everyone this Christmas!