Raised in the Laestadian religious sect in northern Finland, Maria (Amanda Pilke) decides to run away to the big city. Her best friend Raakel (Marjut Maristo) is dispatched by the local elders to bring her back, but finds new temptations in Helsinki that challenge the way she has been raised. Your mileage may vary. Dome Karukosken’s film is even-handed in its treatment of the different worlds of the Laestadian rural cult (which claims some 110,000 members in modern Finland) and Helsinki hipsterism, presenting both as frankly innocent worlds that embrace the simple joy of boys and girls hanging out together, albeit with slightly different ideas of what that might entail. The two worlds are united by the predatory presence of men, who do not differ all that much between town and country – in the north, they are pious family heads who swap daughters like Pokémon cards; in the south they are Swedish-speaking lotharios who cackle amongst themselves in English that they have rounded up a couple of teinihuorat (teenage sluts).

Laestadians shun television, cosmetics and pre-marital sex, although on the plus side they tend to get married as teenagers, so there’s not a whole lot of time to be sexually frustrated before you are a parent to six kids and too tired to care. Bicycles are apparently okay. Oddly, I wrote a similar story myself in 2010, in a Judge Dredd script called The Devil’s Playground, which was also about a religious cultist dispatched to a metropolis to find a lost friend. But in my version, she arrived to find that her friend had been murdered. I had been inspired by the same thing that surely inspired the makers of Kielletty hedelmä, which was the fact that American Amish deliberately send their children into the modern world for a year’s sabbatical, secure in the knowledge that they will reject it.

In a sweetly solipsistic touch, the joy of the modern world is represented through cinema, as Raakel meets her modern man at the movies, with Karukosken’s camera lingering on the flicker of a projector and flirting in the dark at arthouse matinees. The soundtrack contrasts the epic silence of the Finnish countryside with the din of city life. The irresistible temptations of Babylon are presented, variously, as cider, make-up and snogging, which gives the whole thing something of a Handmaid’s Tale feel, not the least when a trio of elders show up, intoning “Blessed Be” and trying to entice Maria back to a life of constant childbirth and kumbayah happiness. If I have any complaints about this film, and I can’t believe I am saying this, it’s that it isn’t gay enough, because although there are vague allusions to the possibility that the two teenage runaways might have feelings for each other, they spend rather a lot of time blowing hot and cold over the attentions of a couple of long-suffering Helsinki metrosexuals, who repeatedly apologise for groping them, when they only want to be groped 50% of the time.

Aleksi Bardy’s script ends up presenting them as a couple of girls who really don’t know what they want, with Maria eventually returning home to face the parentally-determined music, while Raakel cannot resist slapping on some lippy, which she surely knows will get her banished from her father’s table because make-up is apparently evil. Like cider. And snogging. In a final irony, by being sent to retrieve her wayward friend, she is lost to the religious cult, and finds herself banished, weeping on the bus back to the big city. That’s Helsinki, by the way, which really isn’t that big.

Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.