Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

Here is a film in which Santa Claus is a horned, naked, feral creature buried beneath a Lapland fell, excavated by an American drilling crew, and eventually exported as a trained mall attraction. The premise would seem to invite a full cultural audit. It does not survive one, because there is nothing there to audit. The cast is Finnish and Nordic from top to bottom, which is what happens when a film is set in arctic Finland and shot there. No demographic arithmetic intrudes. No character announces an identity. The reindeer herders hunt, bicker, and endure the cold, and the film regards them with the flat patience of a documentary about weather.

The two faint ideological pulses deserve a sentence each. The villainous firm Subzero wants to plunder a Sámi burial mound for profit, which registers as a whisper of corporate critique, though the film treats the company as a monster-delivery service instead of a thesis. And the mythology is thoroughly revisionist, converting a benign gift-giver into a pagan predator whose elves bite ears off. This is folklore turned inside out for suspense. It carries no argument about history or power. The satire of Christmas commercialism amounts to the closing gag in which the captured elves are trained and shipped abroad as seasonal labor.

Everything else is absent by design. There is no sermon, no moral instruction, no plea on behalf of any cause. The film plays its absurd premise with a straight face and expects the audience to meet it halfway. So we have an artifact from 2010 that predates the era of the annotated blockbuster, a modest Finnish genre exercise about frozen monsters and stolen children. It is bracing in its refusal to explain itself. We classify it accordingly, and we move on to the next screening.