Toronto – 9AM in the morning and I was to watch a “horror” film… Having watched it I can safely declare that this is no such thing. Sauna is a very moody film to be sure, but if your expectations were on par with the Ring or Grudge, the most you are likely to get is the view of a dead girl’s feet. Link after the picture to see trailer.
“The 25 year war between Finland and Russia is over…” so said the subtitle, and we’re thrown right into the middle of a border charting expedition. Quickly the background is flushed out: Erik and Knut Spores are two brothers, one an experienced veteran of warfare and the other fresh-meat on the market. (And I never figured out which country they worked for… Sweden or Finland? Or were they ever the same?) After a quick encounter with a lone farming family on their way to meeting their Russian counterparts, the brothers settled into business. But their past caught up with them. The farm girl who Knut had abandoned, locked in the cellar, came back to haunt him, looking very similar to the one in the Japanese Ringu, I might add. The expedition lost their way and hit a bizarre village with a sauna and never came out of it with their lives. The sauna was a very weird construction and completely out of phase with the middle ages setting of the movie. It’s almost minimalist – a white cubic thing with an entrance that’s also the exit. As the team spent time to decide who will take possession of the village, they slowly found out that the whole thing is just “evil”. Everything in it is wrong and everyone gets corrupted – and repenting didn’t make things better.
I found the whole movie disconnected. Sure, small individual elements were cool. The faceless Russian near the very end was interesting, as was the plant collection, etc. I guess the sauna that drew people in, promising but not delivering forgiveness is the whole point. Finns, incidentally, believes the washing away of sins/memories. AJ even mentioned in the Q&A, that the whole theme is that a boundary exist beyond which there is no salvation. This sauna does NOT wash away your sin – it reminds you and makes you suffer for it. So in that light the movie, er, did a good job at being depressing and drab. It was certainly not a coherent, story-driven horror film. But neither was it an art-piece that’s built one event to the other, to make you think hard. That’s because the ending was given up miles before at the beginning of the film, and by the time Erik counted 73 you know that his sins won’t be forgiven. So making him see the destruction of the only glimmer of hope he had (that he made a difference and saved some village girl) was only driving the nails deeper in the coffin, and being a bit too dramatic.
3/5 to AJ. And I think the other name – Filth, is way more fitting for what the movie was portraying.
