It is Christmas 1984, and struggling single mother Niina (Oona Airola) accidentally smashes her new Christmas tree through the window of the local newspaper in Inari, Lapland. Pleading for mercy from the gruff editor Esko (Hannu-Pekka Björkman, unrecognisable beneath an extinction-level mullet wig), she tries to pay off her debt by working for free as a cub reporter. This harder than it sounds because much of Niina’s previously published work was poems about ponies in the school magazine, and Esko’s proudest scoop in the previous year was about a sock that someone lost through a hole in the ice in a fishing competition.

But try Niina does, in the midst of preparations for her sister’s entertainingly ghastly wedding, and an onslaught of guests at the remote Lapland hotel where her mother works. They are in town to investigate a mysterious “UFO” over the Christmas season, which foreign media is speculating was an off-course Russian missile.

Yes, it’s ridiculous. It’s also largely true, as this film from writer-director Miia Tervo draws its inspiration from the true story of the 1984 Lake Inari Incident. Like Atomic Blonde with shell-suits, it exults in the recreation of popular culture from 40 years ago, evoking far too many Finnish family photo albums for comfort – all dun-coloured Datsuns, transistor radios and grim buffets.

Niina’s dogged quest for the truth brings her into encounters with the military men at the hotel, including Kai (Pyry Kähkonen), the handsome, grieving pilot whose inability to see the intruder at high altitude might be one of the clues that it was a low-flying cruise missile. In a flurry of comic touches like something out of an Antti Tuomainen novel, the locals go crazy with Missile Trout (served with sparklers) and phallic Missile Doughnuts on sale. Esko would rather that Niina write about these delights, but she is determined to understand the geopolitical implications of a foreign city-busting weapon crashing near her sleepy hometown, and the implications if it happens to have scattered nuclear waste all over the landscape.

It’s here that the gentle humour of The Missile takes a turn for the dark, as Tommi Korpela growls at doubters that “nuclear power is perfectly safe” (eighteen months before Chernobyl), and the soundtrack ramps up with a bunch of melancholy disco floor fillers redolent of the era’s atomic paranoia.

As with Family Time, another recent Finnish film that Finnair has also seen fit to offer on its intercontinental flights this season, there is also a fine opportunity for learning some new Finnish terms and phrases, including “rubber arse cushion”. “Is the Russian arse so sweet that we have to lick it?” comments one old man, leaving Niina to haphazardly translate it for a baffled visiting Welshman.

Reviews in Finland were almost universally positive and glowing, apart from a lone dissenter, Jussi Virratvuori in the Karjalainen, who flayed it for “not knowing if it was comedy or tragedy.” But Tervo never promised us either – the film begins without credits or explanation, and if later events begin to hove close to the reason why Niina is a “single mother”, with the release from prison of her estranged husband, it’s not like it isn’t telegraphed in the opening scenes.

The presence of a few Estonian names among the cast and crew reveal this film’s origins as an elaborate Baltic Europudding of finances, deftly steered by its producers to land as a gentle evocation of life forty years ago, dripping like The Activists with pointed comments about the degree to which some things never change, with regard to certain neighbours across the border.

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. The Missile is currently streaming on Netflix.

Fugitive Niilo Nurmi (Unto Salminen) is languishing in a San Francisco jail when he is mistaken by the local consul for Yrjö Sahlberg, a Helsinki rich kid who has been missing for years. That is enough to secure him passage home, but whereas Niilo expects to ditch his new benefactors on arrival in Helsinki, he is instead blackmailed into continuing the pretence that he really is the long-lost heir to the Sahlberg fortune. His old criminal buddies, watch-thief “Kello-Kalle” Karlsson (Aku Korhonen – the nickname translated roughly as Charlie Clock, compare to his earlier role as Charlie China in Off with the Shirt and Vest) and kingpin Einari Oksa (Ossi Elstelä) threaten to out him unless he keeps up the act, hoping thereby to secure access to the rich pickings at the Sahlberg mansion.

Welcomed as a prodigal son on his return to the Sahlberg household, Niilo soon discovers that someone is already robbing the family. A thief set to catch a thief, he soon works out that they are being embezzled by their shop manager Kapperi (Yrjö Tuominen), and wrests a confession from the flustered employee. The Sahlbergs are even more pleased with their “long-lost son”, although Niilo must fight off the continued predations of Oksa, who is fobbed off with the wrong keys to the safe, and Karlsson, who wins the heart of the mansion’s cook Tekla (Siiri Angerkoski) and has to be given a job at the company to keep him quiet.

Falling for his “cousin”, Annikki (Ansa Ikonen), Niilo resolves to tell her the truth. She confesses that she, too, has feelings for him, and persuades him to turn himself in, although when he tries to do so, the police inform him that the statute of limitations has run out on all his old crimes, and he has failed to commit any new ones. That’s more than can be said for Karlsson, who is caught stealing the police inspector’s watch, and has to be bailed from prison so he can live happily ever after with his own betrothed, the entertainingly snuggly Tekla.

All’s well that ends well, although when the aged Grandma Sahlberg (Anni Hämäläinen) announces that she will never let Niilo go “again”, the viewer is left pondering if she really is aware, as she has formerly claimed to be, that he is not her beloved Yrjö at all, and that Finland really isn’t just about to see yet another set of cousins get married.

Freely adapted from the Swedish film Like a Thief in the Night (1940, Som en tjuv om natten) Uuten elämään features an oddly post-modern moment in which the writer-director Toivo Särkkä could not decide himself whether Niilo would hand Oksa the right keys, giving into his threats, or the wrong keys. Consequently, he shot both versions, and only decided at the editing stage that Niilo would swindle the swindler.

The film begins with a whole two seconds of stock footage of San Francisco harbour, before switching to a dive bar packed with an unconvincingly “American” crowd listening to a woman singing a torch song in English with an entertainingly German accent – several obviously Finnish women, a Chinese guy, and what appears to be Swamp Thing in an undertaker’s suit. This was clearly shot back home in Helsinki, although in order to distract us, the director executes a 360-twirl around the pub, which only serves to make it look as if the cameraman is drunk.

As so often happens in romantic comedies, the supposed leads are a pair of insufferable drips, and what little entertainment that can be wrung from it comes in the form of the supporting cast. Aku Korhonen puts on a spirited turn as Karlsson the inveterate pickpocket, and is as charming as ever in his interactions with Siiri Angerkoski – I have actually lost count of the number of times these two have ended up as a second-string romance in the background of the A-plot. None of this, however, would save it from the knives of Finland’s critics.

“There has never been a film on the big screen as clumsy,” wrote the reviewer for Uusi Suomi, “The plot of the film is psychologically impossible, and when, in addition, the audience was forced to endure outright indecencies along the way, the viewer left the show disgusted.” I actually read this review before I saw the film, and was all prepared to enjoy some outright indecency, but found it sadly lacking in this department. Other newspapers were similarly damning, with the Ilta Sanomat declaring it to be: “An out-of-date, thoroughly melodramatic and preachy film story presented with a tasteless sentimentality that is suspiciously reminiscent of ‘true stories’ from weekly newspapers.” When the Ilta Sanomat thinks you’re downmarket, you know you’re in trouble.

The two heavyweights of 1940s Finnish film criticism, Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat and Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraatti, both tried to make positive noises about it, but had to concede it was hackneyed. Only the writer for Savo magazine, out in the sticks where people were more easily pleased, came to its defence as a welcome relief from war and strife, noting: “Despite its naivety and lack of realism, My New Life will gain the support of our film audiences, because it has so much of the warmth and beauty that is needed as a counterbalance to today’s harsh and serious reality. And perhaps that was the main purpose of this film.”

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

Born in the early 1900s, Stiina (Irma Seikkula) is a foundling child, left on a doorstep in Helsinki’s Hermanni district, and taken in by Maria Berg (Anni Aitto). Maria is suffering from empty-nest syndrome after her grown-up son Martti (Tauno Majuri) has gone to sea. Stiina is christened at the same time as the neighbour’s son Vesa (Rauli Tuomi), and the two grow up more like siblings than strangers.

After her foster-mother dies, the adult Stiina is working at a grocery when Martti returns from sea. He is impressed with her sunny attitude and charitable acts, and recommends that she study home economics. At college, she shows sympathy and affection for an illegitimate child, remarking that she, too, bears the “Mark of Sin”, despite having no say in the matter herself.

Eventually, she discovers that the frail old lady Helviira (Henny Waljus) works as a backstreet abortionist, and is dying “haunted by the footsteps of all those I have killed.” Tragedy strikes when an abortion goes wrong and the patient, Stiina’s friend Martta (Heilka Helinä) died. The grieving pharmacist’s daughter, Kaarina (Emma Väänänen) reveals that Martta was her own illegitimate daughter, conceived with her fiancé Martti before he went to sea. Or at least, so she thinks. In fact, it is Stiina who was the infant handed to Helviira to dispose of, and Helviira who left the baby Stiina on Maria’s doorstep. Martti and Kaarina are reunited, and Stiina and Vesa are married, two whole families created out of chaos.

I can’t help but wonder if The Mark of Sin (Synnin puumerkki), like the same year’s Safety Valve, is another rumination on the generation that has grown up in Finland since women won the right to vote in 1907. Based on a 1928 novel of the same name by Laura Soinne, its narrative of illegitimacy and discrimination is intensely familiar from many a previous tale of foundlings and single mothers, but whereas such children were McGuffins and plot points in films like The Child is Mine (1940), here they are the protagonists and the agents of their own fate. Many of the tribulations that Stiina faces are rooted in the tensions of the gender divide – a pretty girl without financial security or an official guardian, she is regarded as an easy target by the menfolk of Finnish society. Some of them are genuinely predatory, others are simply unheeding of the pressures she is under simply by being born into her situation.

Writer-director Jorma Nortimo started out as an actor with the rival Suomen Filmiteollisuus studio, before moving into directing – The Mark of Sin was his first movie for Suomi-Filmi, and makes much of Hermanni, a one-time meat-packing district that has been the location of the city prison since 1888. Today, it is a warren of boxy apartment blocks, but Nortimo’s camera thrills in its clapper-board houses, allotments and laundry lines, back in the day when it was not-quite-town and not-quite-country, like so many of the characters that inhabit it.

The ease with which a novel can leap across the years is compromised on film, where one actor cannot play someone for their entire lifespan – although then again, they tried very hard with Ester Toivonen in Scorned (1939). Consequently, much of the establishing moments of the first 20 minutes are left in the hands of two child-actors, Suvi Soila (actually Suvi Orko, daughter of the producer Risto Orko),  and Orvo Kalevi, who appeared as Orvo Kontio in the same year’s Four Women.

It’s they who have to carry the narrative weight of Stiina being bullied as a child, and Vesa coming to her rescue; as well as the character-defining moment when Stiina tries to offer her button collection as payment for her foster-mother’s vital medicine, thereby winning the approval of the local pharmacist. But as critics were quick to point out, there are an awful lot of defining moments in this film. “There would be enough material for several different films,” observed Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraatti. “Towards the end, the viewer becomes so numb that they completely apathetically accept everything, no matter what happens. Nothing seems impossible anymore.”

Others were quick to point out that life in modern Finland was not quite so Dickensian for illegitimate children as the 1928 source material suggested, although I would counter that they might like to ask a few illegitimate children about that. I was present in the room on a fateful day in the 1990s when the father of my then-girlfriend realised that the man he had always thought of as his uncle had actually been his dad. It was a shocking revelation that stopped him in his tracks, as a whole bunch of familial slights and dramas, unspoken tensions and kindnesses suddenly made sense. It also opened a whole new can of worms, since the outed “uncle” had been a Catholic priest.

It all happened in mere seconds, before my very eyes, and it pole-axed him with a dramatic weight you only usually see in movies. It called into question his whole life, years of self-doubt, insecurities and gaslighting, as well as the often-odd behaviour of the people he now realised were his adoptive parents. All of this fell like an anvil on a man who had been born in the 1940s, a whole generation after Finnish critics were scoffing that the drama in The Mark of Sin was all outmoded and forgotten.

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

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.

Consul Ahrman (Paavo Jännes) and his son Timo (Tauno Majuri) believe that they are being followed by enemy agents. Timo is dispatched to Muursalo with a sealed envelope, and confesses to the family’s loyal military friend Rainer Sarmo (Joel Rinne) that he might need help in outrunning would-be saboteurs. Nor are the men paranoid – it turns out that their housemaid Leena (Rauha Rentola) is indeed working for foreign powers, as is revealed when Sarmo catches her doctoring the consul’s tea so she will have time to search his safe.

Sarmo apprehends Leena, only to be disturbed in turn by a masked agent (Hilkka Helinä), who helps her escape. Later on, Sarmo runs into Berita Lopez in a restaurant, falls in love with her, and also realises that she was the masked agent. Berita is the daughter of Luigi Lopez (Wilho Imari), once the richest man in Bueno Aires, ruined by the machinations of the enemy agent Thomas Gardner (Santeri Karilo), who is somehow also responsible for Timo’s fiancée breaking up with him.

Oh dear, what a mess, like trying to make sense of Casablanca through its reflection in a dented kettle. Believe it or not, this was the winning entry in a 1940 script competition hosted by Suomi-Filmi, netting a 50,000-mark prize for its author, the journalist Uuno Hirvonen, who would go on to pen two further adventures for Rainer Sarmo, a.k.a. Dettman, a.k.a. Deadman, in international espionage. The miracle, of course, with Casablanca, which was made a year after this, is that it, too, went into production as a forgettable retooling of the conventions of bedroom farce into espionage with papers and letters of transit and whatnot. It happened to work, in exactly the same way that this film… doesn’t.

The critics, however, loved it, like a breath of freshly noir air, a worthy successor to the earlier The Last Guest (1941). “”The suspenseful atmosphere is especially enhanced by the excellent cinematography,” enthused Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemikraatti. “The camera angles are varied, the lighting effects are inventive and generally the dark tone of the filming is so effective that you are startled when you come out and notice the bright daylight around you.” And, indeed, while the script might be an incomprehensible garbage fire, further compromised by the traditional coyness about revealing who the dastardly enemy power might be (Russia – it’s always Russia), the camerawork is superb. The stills from the film make it look far, far more exciting than it actually is. Hilkka Helina, in particular, is a smoldering onscreen presence, managing to make even an argument over coffee look like a battle to save the world.

Posterity has been less kind. When the film was released on television in 1989, Tapani Maskula in the Turun Sanomat let it have it with both barrels: “Watching the film today, one inevitably wonders about how bad the other stories submitted to the competition must have been when the one that won first prize doesn’t even make any sense.”

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

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.

Orphan Kauko (Tauno Palo) dreams finding his place in life and marrying his childhood sweetheart Ulla (Ulla Ilona). He is dispatched to the big city of Helsinki to work for the stern shop manager Mrs Kankkunen (Siiri Angerkoski), who soon “educates” him about the double standards of the city – he is expected to be fawningly obliging to the rich, and brusquely dismissive to the poor.

An innocent buffeted along by the company in which he finds himself, Kauko learns to flirt and dance, but also gets dragged into conflicts not of his own making, and is thrown in jail after an altercation with a youth in a park. The fact of his incarceration is used to blame him for missing company funds that are actually the fault of his boss. Down on his luck, he ends up at the Salvation Army, where the grey-bearded Urho (Hugo Hytönen) comforts him with the words: “Fate is a wheel, the wheel spins and it spins beautifully.”

These sentiments echo those of “Väliaikainen” (Temporary) the popular song that Kauko sings at several moments in the film, which encapsulates the recurring message that whatever fates befall him in the film, they, too, shall pass: “Life with human worries and sorrows / It’s only temporary Moments in life that shine with joy / Are only temporary, too / This joy and richness of our life / And the love raging in the chest / And that disappointment, really / Everything is temporary.” If the song seems familiar, it’s because it was already used in The Two Vihtors (1939), a similar tale of fluctuating fortunes, but here it is so integral to the story that it is credited as being the inspiration for the entire movie.

Trying to work his way back up the ladder, Kauko takes a job at a sawmill, but at a dance he meets the vivacious and bewitching Eeva (Regina Linnanheimo), who drags him into the orbit of her gang of thieves. Kauko is drafted into a big heist at a furriers, but flees the scene when the police arrive, throwing away the gang’s takings. In punishment, the criminal boss orders him to “take a walk with the Bear and the Butterfly,” two heavies whose ministrations are interrupted by Clauson (Aku Korhonen), a painter who nurses Kauko back to health and intends to use him as a model for his new depiction of the tragic hero Kullervo.

Meeting the elegant Mrs Heimonheimo (Hanna Taini) at the studio, Kauko is smitten, but Clauson warns him that: “She has no heart, only money.” A similarly blunt assistant is delivered to Kauko by his would-be singing teacher, who tells him that he has no real prospects as a professional, but real talent for singing with his heart. Kauko gives up on improving his singing, but nevertheless finds that his raw, untrained voice has a certain folk appeal, and soon leads to a bestselling record.

Kauko is well aware that his fame and fortune is equally fleeting and delivers an embittered performance of “Väliaikainen” at the unveiling of Clauson’s portrait of Mrs Heimonheimo, intending it as a warning to the smug and wealthy patrons that their fortunes, too, might fall at any moment. He falls in with theatre folk who, not for the first time in Finnish cinema, are portrayed as holy fools with some sort of appreciation of life denied mere civilians. He rediscovers the handkerchief gifted to him by the faithful Ulla, and returns to marry her, announcing that she alone brings him true joy.

The cast gather around the table to sing a reprise of “Väliaikainen”, which is supposed to be a happy ending, although the song is probably the last thing you want to sing at a wedding: “The gentle beauty of your girl / As well as the purple blush on her lips / And her smile, really, really / Everything is temporary.” Except the version of the song as used in the film includes new lyrics by Mika Waltari that speak directly to the matter of Finland in 1942: “War, poverty, hunger and anxiety / It’s only temporary / Famine, illness, lack and longing / It’s also temporary.”

The Finnish film world is full of rural innocents facing up to the big city (everywhere from Juurakon Hulda to Forbidden Fruit), but since this is a script by the peerless Mika Waltari, The Wheel of Chance clicks together with clockwork precision. Shot in the winter of 1942, where the requisitioning of snow ploughs to the war effort has led to markedly higher snow banks in the Helsinki streets, it amounts to a rather obvious retread of the earlier Tauno Palo vehicle, The Vagabond’s Waltz (1941), which similarly deconstructs a song into its component stories.

Finnish critics were not so impressed. Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat thought that The Vagabond’s Waltz did a much better job of telling an “airy fairy tale” and found Wheel of Chance (Onni pyöri) disappointingly jejune. Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraatti similarly decried it as a throwaway diversion for a “naïve and simple” audience, and blamed Waltari himself for cynically assembling a set of triggers that would distract the groundlings without delivering any artistic merit.

Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti also put the boot into the poor writer. “It seems incomprehensible how Mika Waltari has allowed his name to be published in connection with such a film,” he fumed, “a film that summarises almost all of the awkwardness of domestic cinema so far, a film that does not even satisfy even a mediocre Finnish viewer, but drops to the level of the most basic comedy and the cheapest means of making people laugh.”

While it’s certainly not Waltari’s best work, I still think it displays a greater awareness of its time than its contemporary critics allowed. Waltari’s script zoomed in on the wainscot society of Helsinki’s spivs and wartime wheeler-dealers, in a creative decision a year ahead of a boom in similar movies – by 1943, everybody was doing it.

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

Liisa Harju (Lea Joutseno) is a quick-witted, vivacious girl from Savo who has been posted to Ostrobothnia, the uppity west coast of Finland where the locals think that she is no better than she ought to be. She thinks she is just being friendly to the handsome local doctor Eino Korpinen (Tapio Nurkka), but their increasingly flirtatious interactions meet with umbrage and annoyance from local womankind, who regard Eino as theirs to fight over. In particular, her arrival seems to irritate the school principal Mr Iipo (Eino Jurkka), whose snooty wife Kristiina (Elli Ylimaa) expects Eino to propose to her insufferable daughter Ester (Rakel Linnanheimo, sister not only to the more famous Regina, but also to the woman who is playing her own mother!).

We have, in a sense, been here before. The tensions and conflicts in Varaventtiili are almost exactly the same as those in Suomi-Filmi’s earlier The Women of Niskavuori (1938), and indeed, Niskavuori’s fearsome matriarch Olga Tainio has a far less substantial role here as a sulking matron. Both films are based on novels written two decades after Finnish women won the right to vote in 1907, grappling in their own way with the impact and attitudes of the first generation to grow up in such an environment. Whereas The Women of Niskavuori ultimately presented its go-getting lady teacher as a clueless, home-wrecking hussy, Safety Valve is more sympathetic to the fact that times are changing. True enough, Liisa doesn’t turn up and steal another woman’s husband, but in the eyes of the townsfolk, she pretty much steals another woman’s potential fiancé. The difference is that Eino is there for the wooing, and if the local girls don’t like it, they’d better up their game and bring something to the party.

Safety Valve wonderfully encapsulates the town-versus-country issues that lie beneath many a Finnish movie of the era, here landing firmly on the side of urban urbanity. The Ostrobothnians think of the people of Savo as uncultured hicks, whereas the Savonians find themselves in close proximity to the growing new towns of Kuopio and Tampere, and Jyväskylä, the “Athens of the North”, the site of the first Finnish-speaking teacher-training college, and hence the engine that churned out thousands of women like Liisa to go out into the world and force gurning farmers’ children to learn about stuff.

The children are the low point of the film – listless child-actors bored by their own lines in the scenes where Lea Joutsena is obliged to pretend to be teaching them. Meanwhile the locals harp on about “traditional values” and the “way things are done” to a ridiculously obsessive degree, acting as if they are preserving the heritage of Western civilisation, but coming across like drunken tramps fighting over a cardboard box in a skip – much of the drama circles around whether the teaching staff are allowed to use the school sauna.

An intriguing subtext of the film revolves around the application of reading and writing. Eino’s true love is destined to be the woman who reciprocates his bizarre interest in “a volume of Chinese poetry, translated into German”, while Liisa’s constant companion is her “safety valve” – the diary that allows her to blow off steam about some of the outrageously dismissive things that the local women say to her.

At least Liisa isn’t left alone to face the yokels. Her fellow teacher Rauha is played by the lovely Irma Seikkula, still displaying the vim and poise that brought her fame as the similarly pro-active Juurakon Hulda (1937). There are moments when the film threatens to break out into genuine humour, with Liisa and Rauha as a pair of icon-busting jokers, like Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock telling everyone to go eff themselves, but sadly that potential never quite manifests.

Safety Valve was based on Hilja Valtonen’s debut novel The Safety Valve of the Young Teacher (1926), a roman à clef about the life of a young woman transplanted to a distant Ostrobothnian town, that had somehow made its way into eight reprintings. This adaptation by scriptwriter Yrjö Kivimiehen sets the action in a timeless rural setting entirely untroubled by the rumblings of the Continuation War that clearly concerned the production team. While the cast of Valentin Vaara’s film go about their business without a care in the world, the backstage crew are dashing feverishly to get the film in the can and into cinemas before wartime austerity bites again – a behind-the-scenes panic that can largely be held responsible for some rushed shots, shaky camera work from a moving train, and substandard location work, clearly shot on cloudy days.

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

A caption in a newspaper in 1938 causes unexpected ructions when its editor Marja Kauria (Helena Kara) lists herself as the daughter of the late philanthropist Walter Timelius (Hugo Hytönen). His spinster sister Agda (Salli Karuna) marches down to the editorial office to demand a retraction. Marja, however, sticks to her guns, and announces that she is, indeed, Timelius’ secret daughter.

A series of flashbacks reveal the whole story – that in 1914, Marja was the product of an affair between Walter and his housekeeper, Iida (Emma Väänänen). Refusing to marry Walter, Iida instead accepts a proposal two year later from the artist Eemel (Oiva Luhtala), who dies in 1927 after the couple have a son, Marja’s half-brother Ville (Lauri Mehto). When Walter dies in 1931, he leaves a large sum of money to Iida, and his family agree to sweep the matter under the carpet.

Marja develops a strong attraction to Hans Timelius (Olavi Reimas), her cousin. Aunt Agda does everything she can to keep the pair apart, eventually funding Hans’s postgraduate research in America in order to keep him away from her. Eventually, when she discovers that Marja and Hans are still keeping in touch, she confronts Marja, claiming that Hans is not her cousin, but her half-brother, yet another illegitimate child of Walter, who had been adopted by his relatives. This however, is not true, because Hans is really Agda’s son, born of a liaison with an artist (it’s always an artist) and adopted by family members to spare her blushes. Finally, Marja and Hans are reunited, and all is… er… well…

Well, I should say, marrying your cousin is not the brightest of ideas, particularly in Finland where it appears to happen rather often. Your correspondent can only imagine yet another time-jump, this time to an allergy-prone Finnish milksop in the 21st century, complaining through his sneezes that his family had a lot of consanguinity in it.

Preserving the pointlessly complex flashbacks and time-jumps of Seere Salminen’s original 1938 stage play, the production of Neljä naista was disrupted by the Continuation War, so much so that scripted summery activities had to be switched for skiing and snowball fights. But there’s no accounting for taste – the Finnish press loved it, and was even prepared to forgive the scatty structure.

Helena Kara is strikingly strong-willed and confident as Marja, in what would be her last film role with Suomi-Filmi before she defected to Suomen Filmiteollisuus with her husband, the director Hannu Leminen.

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