Saturday, January 9, 2010

Mike The Boss - Films of 2010 - Film the Fourth: Sauna


(Erik prepares to do battle with an evil sauna!)

Sauna (2008) (dir: Annila Antti-Jussi)

Hmmm. I has watched plenty of Eurohorror in my time and I am used to them not explaining much of what is going on but I have a feeling I may have really been missing something in this tale from the late 1500s. A war between Russia and Finland-Sweden is over and the border is being marked out by a team of Russians and Finns. They stumble across a village in the centre of a swamp. Everyone is old and there is only one kid there. Secrets abound, the least of which is a creepy old sauna in the swamp outside the village. Here is a hint: if you stumble across a bunch of creepy people, in the middle of a creepy swamp and they happen to have a rundown old building that they use as a sauna, DON'T GO INTO IT. Again, I suspect there is something sort of folkloric thing going on that I did not get so I didn't really understand the film all that much but it is atmospheric, has some good frights and a pretty disturbing ending (if what I thought happened really did happen) so don't let my confusion dissuade you from watching the movie.

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