Lapland, the icy northernmost province of Finland, is one of the places on Earth with the strongest claim to being the home of Santa Claus. Over 600,000 letters are delivered to him in Finland each year, and affluent children from across the world are taken to visit his workshop in Rovaniemi, where they can pat frost-breathed and fuzzy reindeer and mug for photos with velvet-clad elves.
Yet venerable as it might seem, the tradition of Santa’s home in Lapland was only established in 1927 by a children’s radio show, a short decade after Finland’s declaration of independence from Russia. The modern red-cloaked, beaming and bearded Santa of children’s cosy dreams is, as any fool knows, largely visually based on the sterling work of 19th century American cartoonist Thomas Nast and Coca-Cola’s marketing people in the 1930s.
Finland is home to much older tales, though. Scandinavian mythology is the gnarled root of many European folk tales and myths. The Kalevala, Finland’s great epic poem, compiled a few short decades prior to independence, brings together ancient tales of the great sorcerer Vainamomen, who sang spells so powerful that his music caused the earth to swallow up his arrogant young challenger Joukahainen. It’s from that same permafrosted earth that the darkly mythic emerges in Rare Exports’ modern excavation of Christmas traditions.
A violent reclamation of local lore, Rare Exports unpicks the invisible seams that bind the Coca Cola Santa to the ancience Saami myth of the Joulupukki or ‘yule goat’, a malevolent horned creature who terrorised children and was unlikely to be pacified by an offering of sherry and mince pies. It probably has some underlying themes about the despoiling of Arctic beauty by irresponsible mining. More than that, though, it’s a bloody good scare.
The directorial and writing debut of Jarmari Helander, Rare Exports is a formidably gorgeous film, bleak, pallid and stark in contrast to the usual obligatory frosting and stardust of Christmas films. In the jagged, icy mountains of Lapland, a young boy, Pietari and his father Rauno eke out a living from the reindeer herds. This year, though, they face bankruptcy as their horny harvest is decimated. Hundreds of bloody carcasses litter the snow, slaughtered, so their small community thinks, by some particularly ferocious wolves who’ve crossed the Russian border.
Soon, though, other peculiar things start to happen: all the town’s radiators are stolen, and then children start to go missing. Attention soon turns to the Russian/American archaelogical excavation up on Korvatunturi mountain, and what exactly they might be digging up there…
From a slow and suspenseful start held by the charming Onni Tomilla as Pietari and Jomra Tomilla as his wiry, weathered and taciturn widower father, the brutal thrills ramp up deliciously. The sequences where a mysterious naked old man who’s fallen in to Rauno’s wolf pit trap hunches, bony, bearded and bloody in a warehouse are truly chilling. This Santa doesn’t seem to even see adults; they are irrelevant to him, and the shouting, stick-poking and demands from reindeer compensation of the men leave him impassive as rock. Only when Pietari peeks round the door does he come alive, nostrils a-twitch for the scent of naughty. The look of evil hunger in his eyes will pierce through more than one night’s sleep.
It’s the bookish, naive Pietari, though, despite his friend Juuso’s mockery of his credence in fairy tales and Father Christmas, who eventually finds a way to rid the town of its Kris Kringle infestation and secure their financial future into the bargain. His self-sacrificial triumph and Rare Exports’ sentiment-free but still heartwarming spirit is a bracing antidote to the overworked and precious fantasy worlds of the likes of Harry Potter, extolling the virtues of rugged, beardy manliness and Nordic self-sufficience. Well, that, and the belief in a little dark magic as the nights grow long.
Emily Mackay