Sauna (2008)

Posted on 16. Mar, 2009 by admin in Video

“Sauna” is a Finnish-Russian co-production, a unique collaboration, set in a unique time and place virtually untouched in the movie landscape. It’s the year 1595, on the border between Finland and Russia. A long bloody war between the Swedes and Russians has just ended, with Finland caught in the cross-fire. A group of Finnish and Russian geographers is on a journey to map the new border between the two Empires. When they happen upon an uncharted village in the middle of a giant swamp they encounter a dark ghostly curse which threatens the lives of the group.Sauna is a horror film about sins and repentance. The story leads us into the core of darkness, where there is no hope,no salvation. The film flouts the conventions of American horror film making and spends little time explaining some of its more culturally specific quirks. Throw in the fact that the director assumes a certain amount of intelligence from his audience and you have a film that requires you to pay close attention and – most importantly – draw your own conclusions as to what is actually happening and why. The stunning final sequence notwithstanding there is not a lot of flash and bang here, Sauna opting instead for something far more subtle.

imdb info

I can positively guarantee that no other film in the Festival this year will simultaneously recall the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Eli Roth – let alone to such powerful and riveting effects. Antti-Jussi Annila’s Sauna marries these two divergent approaches to cinematic narrative in a way not seen since, well, his previous film, Jade Warrior, which sought a middle way between Chinese historical martial arts films and Kaurism?ki-inspired Finnish slacker road movies.
Like any decent transcendentalist horror film, Sauna is set at a particular, contested moment in history. It is 1595. Brutal wars have just ended in an uneasy peace between Protestant Sweden and Orthodox Russia. Finland has been trampled over and buried. The film concerns the spiritual defeats of two conquered Finnish brothers, one a hardened near-psychopathic war hero, the other a gentle scientist in an age with no use for such men. They find themselves in the swampy interior, demarcating the new border with a unit of sadistic Russians.
The film begins with a moment of affection marred by an act of cruelty. This is an act that will haunt the brothers as their travels take them into eerier territory. When they reach an undocumented town, populated by an ethnically indistinct but practically childless sect, the brothers’ spiritual anxieties escalate, awakening a dark force that feeds off bloody borderlands and the moral vacuums such locales create. The centre of this force is in an otherworldly structure, a kind of proto-sauna appropriately housing a vengeful Scandinavian demon.
Annila is a master of shifting tone. The early scenes have an alienating coldness about them, as we come to know these pitiful siblings. While their spiritual prison begins to make its weight felt, the film takes on an intense claustrophobia and an almost unbearable sadness, alleviated only by the onset of extremely violent, haunting horror, featuring imagery that will occupy your nightmares for days.
This is a director who has something new and fresh to say about the formal properties of genre, and his film is a case study in the modernist project of creating and releasing existential anxiety. – - ~ Toronto International Film Festival 2008

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Sauna (2008)

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