Grandma Ella (Leena Uotila) may be starting to lose her marbles, trilling with dead-eyed wonder at the height of the ceilings in the new Lahti Citymarket. Her daughter Susanna (Ria Kataja) wouldn’t know, because she “only shops for groceries in Sokos”, although what appears at first to be the airs and graces of a nouvelle riche turns out to be a matter of staff discount for a corporate minion. Each declaims random thoughts at the other as they muddle through the preparations for Christmas Eve, in Family Time (2023), a film that this chronological Finnish film blog will not get to in sequence for twenty years or more, but which your correspondent happened to stumble across on Finnair.

Grandpa Lasse (Tom Wentzel) heard a funny story at the fishing club. Daughter Susanna has got a promotion at the department store. Sister Helena (Elina Knihtilä) isn’t as impressed as Susanna thinks she should be. Helena’s son Simo (Sakari Topi) is just about to move out, considerably later than one might expect. Susanna’s kids just want a real Christmas where Grandpa doesn’t watch the telly with a beer in his hand. And Susanna’s husband Risto (Jarkko Pajunen) buries himself in tech support because at least that makes him useful. Literally nobody cares about what anyone else is doing, because nobody really wants to be there.

There is something of a shock for the Finnish film watcher who is hoisted suddenly out of this blog’s current location in the 1940s, to Tia Kouvo’s searing and empathetic study not so much of lost dreams, but of people who never got around to dreaming in the first place. Her modern-day Lahti is a soulless, joyless series of boxy supermarkets; her family gathering is a tense series of misunderstandings from a group of virtual strangers just waiting for it to end. This, then, is what is going to happen to the Family Suominen children when they grow up and have kids, and their kids have kids, and those kids don’t want to do anything but spin doughnuts in the Karkkianen car park.

Kouvo has an incisive eye for people who made a wrong turn so long ago that they can’t even remember which road they were on – a well-deserved win for her as both director and writer at this year’s Finnish academy awards, for this expansion of her 22-minute 2018 short. The film’s Finnish title, Mummola (“Grandma’s Place”) is supposed to invoke cosy winter reunions, but instead is revealed as a series of unwelcome culinary compromises, accompanied by a constant litany of people’s aches and pains. In English, it is called Family Time, alluding to an excruciating workplace workshop that Risto attends, in which he is exhorted to make the most of the eight hours a day that he isn’t sleeping or working. Risto does his best – he is the only person in the film seen reading a book – but even as he attempts to mansplain Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to his wife, she harrumphs that he has no interest in sex any more. Their subsequent confrontation in the garage, where the light sensor plunges everything into darkness unless someone is gesticulating wildly, is a study in pressure cooker drama and black humour.

Kouvo’s feature debut is a series of locked-off shots, the family often in shadow or off-screen, as a series of Pinteresque conflicts unfold. Nobody wants the awful Christmas dinner, Grandma has bought three packets of raisins “because they were cheap” but nobody got any walnuts. Grandpa isn’t just watching the rally in his pants (“NOBODY WANTS TO SEE YOUR BALLS!” shouts Grandma) but it’s a video of the rally, while his grand-daughter Hilla (Elli Pajanen) harangues him for not watching a Christmas movie at Christmas.

In one beautifully executed sequence, Risto and the kids tardily decorate the Christmas tree in silence while his off-screen wife and sister-in-law embark upon a nuclear argument about the difference between butter and margarine. Remarkably little happens in Family Time, but one is left with the impression that remarkably little has happened to these people for their whole lives. At least Hilla makes an attempt at being the voice of reason, gently chiding her grandfather for the amount of money she presumes he has thrown away on booze. These are quintessentially Finnish heroes, living embodiments of what Tolkien once called “sadly unsentimental lovers,” speaking wonderfully clear Finnish, for all you language students who want to be able to practice: “Grandpa shat on the carpet right in the middle of Hilla’s lovely song.”

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