Jalmari Helander

  • Rare Exports (2010)

    Rare Exports (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) The idea of a horror film in which Santa isn’t a kindly friend to all isn’t exactly original these days, but it’s given an energetic spin in Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports. The Santa mythology is taken for a spin when a vast and ancient burial chamber is discovered inside one of Finland’s mountains – and a violent creature escapes. Santa is scary here, and his elves aren’t much better. Equal parts action, fantasy, horror and plain old holiday comedy, Rare Exports is a high-concept, low-brow mainstream crowd-pleaser… at least in concept. The material isn’t as much “psycho Santa with an axe” (as is often the case when horror meets Christmas) but “Krampus by another name.” Visually, it’s surprisingly slick: good special effects combined with Finnish shooting locations mean that we get a cold wintry atmosphere made for chills, and some very sharp cinematography. Narratively, the film struggles a bit more: The script doesn’t get to the meat of its premise for a long time, and there’s a sense that the film has more ideas than the means required to execute them. The ending doesn’t quite tie things up enough (the final joke is based on a previous short film by the writer-director, which doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest) and the pacing of the entire film is inconsistent. Nonetheless, there’s some interesting material here, and given Rare Exports’ lack of holiday cheer it can play pretty well at any time other than the weeks leading up to December 25.

  • Big Game (2014)

    Big Game (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2016) Now here is a pleasant surprise: an honest big-budget slam-bang action thriller featuring iconic images about the American Presidency, coming from… Finland. What? Well, yes. Thanks to the magic of special effects, global financing, location shooting and well-paid actors, even Finland is able to put together the kind of movie that Hollywood wishes it could make. Big Game’s premise is absurdly simple (Air Force One is sabotaged and brought down deep in Finland’s forests—only a boy can help the President escape his pursuers) but it works, largely because writer/director Jalmari Helander is willing to go big and bold on his images and action sequences. It does help that the film can rely on Samuel L. Jackson as a curiously cowardly president, and Jim Broadbent as an oracle of truth with a hidden agenda (his last scene is fantastic). But when the film shows Air Force One crashing into a lake, or being ripped apart by its auto-destruction mechanism, or the President running in the woods like hunted prey, or a heliborne freezer slamming through a forest, this is the kind of action movie iconography that Hollywood has unexplainably abandoned lately. No wonder if Big Game works so splendidly well once it firmly engages into its first act: It plays the action movie Hollywood game better than Hollywood itself, and keeps piling up the cool stuff. It’s unabashedly a thriller and it doesn’t try to be anything else. As such, it’s a success … and it’s too bad that a lot of American filmgoers won’t even hear of it.