trendaway.com

Sauna is another project by director Antti-Jussi Annila in which he combines different genres in a bizarre mash-up. His previous film Jade Warrior (which played at TIFF in 2006) incorporated Chinese martial arts with Finnish mythology. This film takes the horror genre and tries to marry it with a historical epic.

It fails. The fourteenth century setting is instantly appealing but then becomes bland as we discover that the two main brothers and a team of three others are joining forces to map out a new Swedish-Russian border after a 25 year war. Yawn! Then the traditional, pre-Christian Finnish concept of the sauna washing sins away comes into play, and these characters certainly have a lot of no-no’s in their not-too-recent paths. The brother with the significantly lesser bloody past is haunted first, and the most, while his near-blind brother’s 73 kills take their turn later.

About the older one: a lot of attention is given to his poor eyesight and the use of his spectacles (still a rather new invention back then, I suppose), but aside from one comment near the end, it pretty much led to nothing. Maybe we were supposed to see the tough guy as being weak? I dunno.

The horror parts weren’t much more than jumpy, and the historical epic parts were uninteresting to me - at least as the subject matter of a film. They should have picked one and concentrated on that.

It did have a great look to it, though. The ominous sauna was very creepy and there is no way that I would have ever stepped into it. Also, the “scary thing”, although I have no idea why or how we see it at the end, was truly frightening; I wish that it had been used throughout the film instead of just at the end.

This was screening 5/26.