In what has to be the worst Finnish film so far on this watchathon, seven idiots in the Häme hinterland are chastised for keeping a bad house. They struggle to learn to read, and bellow at each other about how hard life is. They get into a bunch of fights, and build a house, and they kill some cows.

The film begins with a pious shot of the statue in central Helsinki of Aleksis Kivi, concentrating on his face, and not on the whole image, which genuinely looks as if he is shifting uncomfortably in his seat as if he has just sat in a wet patch. And it’s the fact that this was Kivi’s first and only novel, an early work of Finnish literature, which supposedly saves this shouty nonsense in the eyes of Finnish critics. A big deal for being based on the first Finnish novel, but really, it’s so boring that you’re left surprised that anyone ever wrote another one.

Credited to the usually reliable Mika Waltari, but actually a work that Waltari had doctored from a set of other drafts by other writers, the story is defeated by the impossibly over-large cast, with seven leads, all of whom have to take turns speaking like they are some kind of boy-band.

Musicians play a merry jig, while a woman at the edge of shot stares at them angrily as if they have just stamped on her cat. The brothers dance with the local girls, and apparently they are accepted into the local community. Whatever, it’s awful, rivalled only by The Heath Cobblers (1938), another Aleksis Kivi adaptation, in its crushing dullness.

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