The setting for ‘Sauna’ is original and brave. Delving deep into Finnish history, it begins in 1595 – in the wake of a brutal 25 year war between Sweden (of which Finland was then part) and Russia. The armistice has been signed and two groups or commissioners – one Swedish and the other Russian – have been sent into the spooky, uninhabited swamplands to decide exactly where the border should be.
With this premise the movie begins – shockingly and bloodily – and you might assume that it’s going to shoot forward in time to a modern Finnish town where a sauna has been built on the ‘sacred ground.’ Perhaps it’ll be a kind of Finnish, teen-horror movie with school-leavers being swallowed-up by the spirit of Väinömöinen.
No. ‘Sauna’ is nothing that at all. It sticks, firmly, to thought-provoking exploration of the psychology of war, the depths to which soldiers will sink to stay alive and the spine-chilling acts that war renders them capable of. It focuses on two brothers – Eerik (Ville Virtanen) and Knut (Tommi Eeronen). Eerik has long fought in the war while his younger brother, training to be a geographer, has sheltered from it Stockholm. Brothers in arms, their relationship begins to fall apart after a terrible ‘sin’ is committed by them against a young Finnish girl and her family in a house which they raid for supplies.
Eventually – in the middle of the swamp – the commissioners not only find that they are haunted by the girl but they stumble across a rather unsettling village. It is on no maps, it is Orthodox and it only seems to have one child, and she likes dressing up as a boy. In the middle of the village’s lake is a special sauna which ‘washes away sin’ and, eventually, the guilt-stricken brothers find themselves entering it with diabolical consequences. This exploration of Finland’s Pagan or semi-Pagan borderlands is, at the very least, interesting.
‘Sauna’ successfully – and without any major special effects – creates a sense of climax and of horror. But it is a nauseating, cold kind of horror. There are no dramatic, spine-tingling ‘Argh!’ moments, as in the average Hollywood horror flick. The scenes make you feel not so much scared as ever-so-slightly revolted and sick. The movie adds to this eerie, unnerving atmosphere with a plot which, as far as I’m concerned, was extremely confusing, random and difficult to make sense of. I wonder if this was a deliberate psychological ploy to disarm the viewers, make them more suggestible and so make them easier to frighten. But, in terms of giving us a spooky atmosphere, the quality of acting and the way the scenes were put together, this was a reasonable movie. And it won awards in these areas.
That said, I have seen far more convincing horror movies than Sauna. The dead, detached atmosphere which the director fosters makes it difficult to really empathise with any of the main characters. I found myself not particularly caring what happened to any of them. Surely, in a good horror movie you are persuaded to ‘get behind’ at least one of the characters and really want him to survive. I did not find this in ‘Sauna.’ Some form of character development is crucial in any successful movie and, to some extent, this is portrayed. But because it’s been difficult to get behind of the characters, this isn’t moving in the way that it should be. It is true that the confusing plot fosters a ‘spooky’ atmosphere. But it also makes the film more difficult to follow and this means that, to hold the viewer’s attention, the film has to be really spell-binding. It isn’t. The bizarre plot just made me bored and distracted and after a while I had no idea what was going on in the movie and didn’t really care. If you’re going to produce a supernatural story it has to be very carefully thought-through and very well done to permit the viewer to maintain their sense of suspended disbelief. For me, ‘Sauna’ just didn’t work.
The DVD’s case boasts about its positive reviews – 4 stars in Ilta-Lehti and a commendation from Kaleva – so it’s possible I’m missing something. Sauna put me in mind of the Blair Witch Project and various Japanese movies such as The Ring, all of which I disliked. Some reviewers have compared it to ‘The Grudge’ but I quite liked that, so I don’t think my lukewarm review reflects some kind of problem with the genre. By the way, the English subtitles stick pretty faithfully to what is said apart from the fact that they cut out all the swearing to save space.
If you enjoyed movies such as The Blair Witch Project, then you’d probably get something out of this film. But for this reviewer, Sauna was a bit disappointing. There have been some excellent Finnish movies of late but I don’t think this is one of them and I wish I’d rented something else.
2008. Directed by Antti.Jussi Anilla. Written by Iiro Kuntner.
