Paavo Kannas (Tauno Palo) is an architect who is struggling to get work done at his interior design office, because of the “trouble” caused by all his beautiful female assistants. His friend Professor Thorelius (Urho Somersalmi) offers to provide him with a plain and efficient girl, but since this is Finland, has to work hard to make his student Hilkka (Brigit Konström) not look like a supermodel. Hair in a bun and a pair of spectacles produce the desired look [actually, they really don’t; she ends up looking exactly like Julia Sawalha, which works for me!], and Paavo settles in for a happy life with his new efficient underling.

Inevitably, Paavo runs into Hilkka while out on the town and she is not wearing her disguise. Not wishing to lose her job, she pretends to be Miss Pallero, a Karelian girl. Smitten with “Miss Pallero”, Paavo begins to suspect that Hilkka might be putting one over on him, and schemes to put her in a position where she has to take off her spectacles and let down her hair. Eventually, they come clean with one another about their feelings, and get married.

Wait! That’s not the end! We’re still only partway through, because now Hilkka is Mrs Kannas, getting increasingly annoyed at all the pretty young women who continue to flap around her husband. Hilkka drops in unannounced at one of Paavo’s workplaces, and believes that she sees him snogging the lady of the manor, Brita (Sirkka Sipilä). Meanwhile, it turns out that Professor Thorelius has plans on nabbing Hilkka for himself and is inviting her to meet his parents as if they are already courting.

Despite a looming divorce, Paavo and Hilkka must collaborate on a fast-track remodelling job, as the returning Finnish-American Makkonens (Aino Lohikoski and Jalmari Rinne, bellowing and code-switching like a pair of nutters) turn up making brash demands to have their Helsinki residence ready in a single day. The Makkonens reveal that they have only selected the Kannas company because it is run by a happily married couple, forcing Paavo and Hilkka to impersonate their younger, happier selves. Predictably, their feelings for each other are truly rekindled.

While I might jest about how difficult it is to find an unattractive Finnish woman, Marriage, Inc. actually began life as a Swedish play, adapted for the screen in 1941 as Så tuktas en äkta man (This is How to Discipline a Real Man). Seeing its potential, but presumably also realising that it needed to be fully localised, Suomen Filmiteollisuus’ Toivo Sarkka bought the rights, mothballed it from ever having a Finnish release, and instead commissioned his own remake, directed by Hannu Leminen and written by Turo Kartto, who drowned, aged 32, near Espoo shortly before the premiere.

Several moments in the film point to its wartime setting – Paavo mentions that the country is in “an exceptional situation”, and there are glimpses of blackout curtains, wood-fired cars and censored mail. In fact, the film was wrong-footed in production by the drafting of several of its intended crew, leading to a filming delay that required scripted scenes of winter activities to be hastily retooled for the summer. The filmmakers, however, do not seem to have been able to bring themselves to remove a dance sequence – dancing was frowned upon in wartime as an insult to the men at the front, but here seemed vital to move along the plot. The weirdest thing about it for me is the episodic structure, which feels less like a 102-minute feature and more like four TV episodes stitched together. The way that such formatting changes the narrative course makes this film seem strangely ahead of its time, aimed at the shorter attention-spans and quicker resolutions of a television audience, years before anyone in Finland even owned a television.

As also happened during the Winter War, the Finnish press seemed to have a mixed reaction to such fripperies, with some welcoming them as a light-hearted distraction in wartime, and others harrumphing at the very idea of making light of life in troubled times. Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat carefully negotiated these contradictory reactions, calling it flexible, witty and sure-footed, but also decrying “the illogicality, the lack of naturalism, and tasteless scenes…. Moreover, the whole story is not particularly suitable for our environment… In addition, the development of the events is so obvious that it is not very interesting.”

Birgit Konström’s acting is much broader than usual, as if she is playing to the cheap seats in a stadium rather than performing for an intimate camera. Nevertheless, Marriage, Inc. still made me laugh eight decades on, not the least for Tauno Palo’s double-take when a breathless lady customer starts thrusting her boobs under his flustered eyeballs, or the way that Konström feverishly begins rootling around in her handbag to avoid his gaze at the restaurant, and the unintelligibly bubbly Karelian accent she puts on to throw him off the scent.

The movie’s stand-out song “Shamppanjakuhertelua” (Champagne Party) notes the fact that the farce is playing out on both sides of the gender divide, pointing out that men and women can be as shallow as each other when it comes to only noticing surface appearances, and that “men can miss beauty / repelled by spectacles” a somewhat Finnish take on Dorothy Parker’s more concise turn of phrase: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.

Convicted of starting a minor border war between Norway and Finland, the symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal band Impaled Rektum serve their time in an island prison, where they are forbidden from playing anything but dance music but get to enjoy a highly regarded salmon buffet.

When bank foreclosures threaten the reindeer farm owned by lead guitarist Lotvonen’s dad, the band bust out of prison and run for Lithuania, where they have been promised a literally Faustian record deal by the impresario Fisto (Anatole Taubman). They cross the Gulf of Finland by stowing away in the tour bus of Blood Motor, a once-great band now in unstoppable decline, fronted by the doleful, leonine Rob (David Bredin).

Bass player Xytrax (Max Ovaska) sees Fisto for what he really is, and refuses to have any truck with his desire to dumb down Impaled Rektum’s sound by adding… urgh… synthesisers and friendlier fonts. He even wants to put drummer Oula (Chike Ohanwe) in lederhosen, which only a psychopath would ever do. But lead singer Turo (Johannes Holopainen) is eager to please and tempted by the allure of fame, prepared to repeatedly compromise and even forgetting that the band are supposed to be in this for the money to save Lotvonen’s farm.

Partway through Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren’s joyous Heavier Trip (a sequel to 2018’s Heavy Trip), German news reporters descend on a crime scene in Rostock, where a museum of priceless rock memorabilia has burned to the ground during a fight started by a Finnish death metal band. They push a microphone into the face of a dazed Norwegian witness, who mumbles: “Monarch to the kingdom of the dead, infamous butcher, angel of death.” All the Slayer fans in the cinema cheered.

So… just me, then. Not for the first time at a Finnish comedy film, I was the lone laugher at many of the jokes: the eternally flaming guitar of Jimi Hendrix; Lou Reed’s old liver, preserved in a jar; Dave Mustaine’s six-fingered hand; Lemmy from Motorhead’s hat (“If hats could talk, this would be a very traumatised hat”), and the sight of a very small Stonehenge.

But it’s the music that is the real star of Heavier Trip, with composer Mika Lammassaari presiding once more over truly loving, thumping recreations of rock classics, from the “found” sounds of a malfunctioning washing machine, to full-blown death-metal epics. I was left alone in the cinema as the credits rolled, waiting for the closing list of song titles and arrangements, sure that somewhere in there was a thrash metal cover of Barry Manilow or something equally crazy (sadly, no), as well as a bunch of bands that I thought were throwaway joke names, but turned out to be real. The (fictional) Blood Motor’s performance is fantastic, until the ailing Rob is dragged into the crowd by shrieking groupies, and Turo has to step up to the microphone to finish his song for him.

Heavier Trip is unapologetic in its celebration of heavy metal, both the bombastic, pompous form of, say, Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium, and the sell-out, commercial folly of…. well, Celtic Frost’s Cold Lake. Xytrax struggles with his disdain for the perky Japanese rockers Babymetal, despite overwhelming evidence that they are just as hardcore as he is, just in a different way. As he sits, dejected at a bus stop, mirroring the set-up for a famous scene from My Neighbour Totoro, he encounters not a Catbus, but Babymetal’s tour van – the real life Babymetal play a pivotal role in the film, but seem to leave it a scene too early, as if they were afraid of turning into pumpkins.

Many of the gags will fly over non-metal heads. Fisto takes separate phone calls from someone called James and someone called Lars, which only Metallica fans will understand. Turo gains a pair of bat wings modelled on those of the Eurovision game-changer Lordi, and nobody asks why Norwegian rockers Abbath seem to require a fresh corpse backstage as part of their performance conditions. But there are also some lovely little gags that will only hit home with Finns, such as the moment that Mrs Lotvonen (Sinikka Mokkila) respectfully tries to address Xytrax by his preferred band name, but instead calls him Zyrtec, the name of an over-the-counter anti-histamine.

Few of the small-town supporting cast from the first film are to be seen here – there is no sign of Turo’s lounge-singer nemesis, or florist would-be girlfriend. Apart from the reindeer-farming Lotvonens, who provide the McGuffin that gets the band out of jail, the only other holdover from Heavy Trip is Ms Dokken (Helén Viksvedt), unconvincingly demoted from border guard to prison guard in order to give the film someone to chase the band across Europe.

Sometimes, it does seem that there’s rather a lot going on – including the chase plot as Dokken pursues her escaped prisoners and the gotta-save-the-farm plot that is largely forgotten and resolved in a hurry over the credits. But the real heart of Heavier Trip is the band’s clash with the world beyond the small-town fame of the original film, in the dog-eat-dog struggle of bands that have found success, but don’t know what to do with it. It is quite literally the “difficult second album” of the saga of Impaled Rektum. Surely a Heaviest Trip awaits in the future…?

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland, the country with the largest number of metal bands per capita in the world.