Like fruitcake, "Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale" is not for everyone. A horror movie about Santa Claus? Please. Most of us want to go to bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads, not nightmares about dead reindeer and abducted children. But for anyone who can look a little askance at the monster that contemporary Christmas has become, this artfully made Finnish tale is - I kid you not - a real treat.
Set in northern Finland a few days before Christmas, Jalmari Helander's film centers on Pietari (Onni Tommila), an adorable kid who has suddenly taken it into his head that Santa is out to get him. Guess what? He's right.
Jumpy and watchful, Pietari has reason to start dressing in hockey pads and a helmet everywhere he goes, slinging a brand-new hunting rifle over his shoulder. That bear trap he has set out under the chimney of the house he shares with his widowed father, Rauno (Jorma Tommila)? A very good idea.
On a nearby mountaintop, it seems, employees of a mysterious multinational corporation have unearthed an ancient burial site - it's always an ancient burial site, isn't it? - and are preparing to remove its cryogenically preserved occupant. He's old and he's cold, but he's not the jolly man in red we think of at Christmastime.
Though subtitles refer to this undead Kris Kringle as "Santa" throughout the film, the name the Finns use for him is "Joulupukki" ("Yule Goat"). While in today's Finland Joulupukki is almost indistinguishable from what one of Pietari's friends calls the "Coca-Cola Santa Claus" of American lore, the Joulupukki of hoary Scandinavian legend was a demonic, horned goat-man who would make the rounds at Christmastime, not carrying presents, but carrying off - and even torturing - naughty kids.
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