(a.k.a. RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS STORY; director/co-screenwriter: Jalmari Helander. Co-screenwriter: Juuso Helander, Jalmari’s brother. Dialogue writers: Petri Jokiranta and Sami Parkinnen.)
This Finnish-language (with some English dialogue) film is a delightful, masterful mix of light and darkness, humor, fantasy, brief action, horror, mythology, and heart. It’s rated R for male/nonsexual nudity, brief violence, thematic darkness, occasional bloodiness, and profanity.
After an American company, Subzero Inc., falsely advertising itself as a crew of “seismic researchers,” blasts open the icy tomb of the original, beastly Santa Claus within the Korvatunturi Mountains, strange things happen in the area.
Meanwhile, a young boy, Pietari Kontio, is concerned about the presence of Subzero Inc. and its continuous mountain-blasting. He researches the original Santa myth (where he’s a child-devouring monster who was frozen, trapped by the Sami people). Then the reindeer roundup goes awry, One of the American crew members─thirty years old, but he looks like an old, feral-eyed man─is found in Pietari’s father’s illegal wolf pit, harbinger of the chaos to come.
At eighty-four-minutes, RARE moves at a brisk pace. The deft, multi-genre tone of it is mostly light with a touch of dark, its ambience furthered by Mika Orasmaa’s cinematography and Juri Seppä and Miska Seppä’s spot-on soundtrack. The cast is dead-on as well, especially Pietari (played by Onni Tommila) and his father (Rauno, played by Jorma Tommila, Onni’s real-life father). Jalmari Helander, the director, is Onni’s maternal uncle.
RARE is one of my Top Five Christmas movies of all-time for its originality, its charm (it always maintains a heartfelt feel, even when events are dark) and its overall execution by the filmmakers. Well worth your time this, if the above elements appeal to you, and you keep your expectations realistic.
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