Dir. Erik Blomberg
Falling in love and marrying, the
wife of a hunter enquires about a ritual to make him fall in love with her even
more, hesitant since he is continually out for long periods to hunt. The ritual
however leads to disastrous consequences of her continually turning into a
white reindeer, which entices hunters to try and catch her, only for her to
turn back with fangs and kill them. As people in her village die, slowly it
leads to tragedy. The film is not that long, brisk in its running time, and
tells this story with immense amount of engagement. The different environment,
of the snow covered Finnish lands, adds a freshness to this film, seeing the country's
traditional culture through this supernatural tragedy and being able to
appreciate it.
Erik Blomberg uses the
environment to its full advantage too. The village community is very close
knit, small, where increasing amounts of death from sinister causes would bring
anxiety to them more so, and the vast white landscape is isolating, able to be
lost in it or pulled away from other people to die alone within it.
Aside from this, it's just an
alright film. It's no way near the best take on this idea, of love broken by
the curse of bestial transformation, but The
White Reindeer is still good. This does actually make it difficult to write
a lot about the film because of how small it is, so rigidly concentrated it is
on just depicting its story. It could be a flaw of the film that it leaves
little space for tangents that stand out, or a flaw in me for being unable to
go into more detail about the virtues that are there. Probably the biggest flaw
with the film is that it does so well in merely telling the story that it loses
out on the potential elaborate artistry that could have made it a great film
too. But as the Finnish entry for this series, the obsession with using
supernatural and horror cinema to look back on traditional culture and folk law
has always revealed itself in films defined by various countries, including my
own, and it's very interesting and distinct with the better examples like this.
The ominous aspects, the bestial aspects having a physical affect on the
heroine's appearance, the shrine she conducted the ritual at littered around
with reindeer skulls and bones, mix with the basic aesthetics of the period of
the clothes, the everyday activities of the people and the relationships with
fascinating effect. You can probably learn more about a country through films
like this than other mainstream entertainment or news documentary. The White Reindeer, melancholic and
ultimately sad by its end credits, shows a great deal of Finland, even if the
film's short and to the point, and makes you wish you could see more.
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