Over the holiday season I’ll be sharing streaming recommendations for movies for when you want to feel festive but not necessarily Christmassy, and also for Christmas movies that you may not have heard of before. Today: one of the latter.
And as my holiday gift to you, if you become a paying Substack subscriber by December 31st, you’ll get 50% off your first year.
To explain what the title means would be an unforgivable spoiler. But some things can be safely revealed about the 2010 bone-dry Finnish black comedy Rare Exports: When Santa Claus is excavated at an archaeological dig at the Finnish-Russian border, where he was imprisoned in a subterranean ice prison by the medieval Finns weary of his monstrous ways, the, er, creature becomes a valuable pawn between the local Finnish reindeer hunters whose food source has been destroyed by the dig and the Russian industrialist behind the operation.
You know, a traditional holiday tale.
Inspired by Finnish pagan folklore, this outlandishly demented Christmas fantasy is part cultural battle between big business and small enterprise, part mythological horror movie. It finds a grim awfulness in a supposedly pleasant fantasy with equal measures of wit and chills. (Read my 2010 review.)
US: stream on Kanopy; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Mubi (via Prime); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Rare Exports at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
Thanks for doing this. The incessant Christmas music is really starting to get to me.
I unapologetically love this movie; this is the FestivKwanChristmUkkah spirit I want.