Apparently,
rural Finland is a place where a person can meet a variety of
colourful characters, like a car mechanic who bears the title “of
thousand vaginas”, a bunch of comically useless neo-Nazi poseurs
who call themselves “The Soldiers of Finland”, but instead of
fighting the non-existent immigrants, they are more interested in
designing logos and stealing car tyres, a hospice nurse with the
taste for erotic asphyxiation or a motorbike repair-man who
moonlights as a euthanizer for the folks poor enough to go to greedy
veterinarians at the clinic. The latter is the titular character of
an offbeat drama-thriller directed by Teemu Nikki, self-taught
filmmaker with a number of shorts, music videos, commercials, a hit
series and two feature-length films behind him. It is already quite a
success that there were some brave or crazy people in Finnish film
institutions to make Euthanizer an Oscar candidate. Chances
are slim, but, hey, who would think that Lordi could win the Eurosong
contest?
Euthanizer’s
“Christian name” is Veijo Haukka and he is a bit of a jerk, a
60-ish pipe-smoking loner who will give his customers a lecture about
how they are the cruel ones for actually keeping animals as pets
without knowing enough about their natural needs. He is played to
perfection by the legendary Finnish character actor Matti
Onnismaa. Veijo’s ethics might seem unorthodox, yet firm:
smaller animals like cats would get a gas chamber made out of an old
car, dog will get shot, even the roadkill will get a proper burial
and not a single healthy animal would die of his hand.
He
is less merciful with people not just because of his seemingly
heartless lectures, but his general attitude towards people. He will
not hesitate to give hard time to the veterinarian he finds greedy
and unethical, and even to his dying father (Heikki Nousiainen),
a former alcoholic now in hospice. Like some kind of a folksy
philosopher, Veijo sees that everybody, his father included, should
receive just the right amount of pain before they die. It might seem
that he is given a chance of happiness when he meets his father’s
nurse Lotta (Hannamaija Nikander) who takes an instant
interest in him, but his principal character flaw and a
misunderstanding of sorts will get him in trouble with an emasculated
member of a nazi gang named Petri (Jari Virman) and his thug
buddies…
A
piece of trivial information says that Nikki has finished the
principal photography of the film before even looking for funding,
but it can be explained with the fact that most of his cast and crew
were his collaborators on previous project, including the actors and
co-producer Jani Pösö who also served as the co-writer on
his two previous features Simo Times Three (2012) and
Lovemilla (2015). Nikki was his own editor and together with
the cinematographer Sari Aaltonen keen on handheld camerawork,
he also served as the set and costume designer. The whole budget was
around 300.000 € and the film has a certain B-movie appeal to it.
Speaking
of that, it is worth noting that the whole B-movie thing is not a
piece of hipster irony (even though there is more than enough irony,
sarcasm and pitch-black humour delivered with a deadpan seriousness
in the film’s text, which is kinda typical for the Finnish way of
life), but an earnest effort in the likes of Monte Hellman’s
films where animals, cars and vistas also have a certain role in
social landscape and the “smart-ass-ery” of the protagonist can
be read as a tribute to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry
which Nikki quotes as a big influence.
On
the other hand, Euthanizer does not just play cool like
B-movies usually do, it is cool because, of all things, its emotional
core and strong sense of humaneness portrayed through the
unapologetic character of Veijo (who is the only one fully
developed). It might take time for him to get under our skin, but
once he is there, we could follow him to the end of the world. His
larger than life personality (due to Onnismaa masterful acting),
together with the title, is the reason for the film to work also as
an out of the box origins story to a superhero series, which, having
Rendel in mind, might be a trend in Finnish genre cinema. We
might just need a slightly different ending, maybe one more scene,
one more shot, mid-credits or a regular one.
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