Rare Exports

  Way back in the noughties, while this sort of thing still wasn't that common, a couple of weird little Christmas-themed shorts made the rounds on the internet. They detailed the operation of a company that operates in the Scandinavian wilds hunting the most dangerous game: wild Father Christmases. They then process them, train them, and send them all over the world to... work as mall Santas.
 The shorts were extremely well made, weird and funny. They caught on well enough that creator Jamie Helander successfully pitched to make a movie out of them.

 Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale works as a bit of an origin story for the company in the shorts. It's also very well made, weird and very funny in its own deadpan way.

You better watch out.

 It starts with a British company running a dig on a Finnish mountain. As their chief scientist (Per Christian Ellefsen) explains, it's not really a mountain - it's a giant burial mound that the Sami built over centuries to contain... something big.

 Two local kids are spying on the brits. One of them, Pietari (Onni Tommila), is obsessed with an ancient, horned, Krampus-like Nordic version of Santa - a giant being that tortured and ate naughty kids (the books he bases his research on are full of delightful woodcuts of Santa doing just that). He figures that's what the foreigners are digging for; And he's right, of course.

 Soon , the local reindeer hunters (which include Pietari's father, Rauno, played by the actor's real father Jorma Tommila) find a local herd of reindeer dead, butchered in the snow. Blaming the foreigners, and enraged at the loss of their livelihood, they go up the mountain but find the dig site empty, just a huge gaping wound in the ground and things left as if people have been taken in the middle of the night.

 In an unrelated development, they capture a silent old feral man who, when given a chance, bites the ear off one of the hunters. The scenes where the wary hunters (plus Pietari) uneasily watch over this weirdo are easily the best in the movie. As the hunters hatch a hare-brained plan to ransom their ward, they discover that all the local children are missing, and that there might be a bigger threat closing on their tiny settlement.

 Rare exports is a truly bizarre movie. It commits admirably to being a serious horror film, burying its jokey premise under completely deadpan seriousness and some really great atmosphere. It's also pretty grim - there's plenty of butchered reindeer, and the missing ear gets pretty graphic. But it's also very much a kid's movie as Pietari takes over as a protagonist in the third act and the horror-compatible beats like knowing what's going on even though no one believes him shift towards a more blatant PG adventure - things like coming up with the plan that saves the day and a triumphant airborne ride. A heroic sacrifice, even!

 The weird tonal clash works against the movie; Almost all kills happen off-screen, for example, and the main threat looming in the background... never really materializes. Along with the tonal shift at the end, this leaves the narrative oddly truncated and unsatisfying.
 On the balance against that is, well, just what an odd duck of a story this ends up being, and the film's beautifully wrought surfaces: The music (by Juri and Miska Seppa) is epic, the cinematography (Mika Orasmaa) gorgeous, and writer/director Jamie Helander keeps the pacing flowing expertly and grounds the ridiculousness with lived-in relationships and plenty of details that give plausibility to the action.

 It's a wickedly odd joke of a film, unsatisfying but still well worth a watch. I've done so a couple times over the years and I still can't fully embrace it, but I get the feeling that if I'd seen this when I was thirteen I'd be a lifelong fan.