Wonderful and heartbreaking. Its structure is draining with its downward emotional spiral of a story (and it wasn't exactly happy to begin with) and its insistence on putting you in Iris's shoes particularly as relates her soul crushing, monotonous job, yet Iris is so easy to sympathise for as a result of all this that the film is never less than utterly immersive. Kaurismaki captures loneliness incredibly here and it's a huge credit to the film we still care for Iris even at the very end.

A great little film. My first Kaurismaki, I think there will be more.

This is so pitch black I can hardly see how it may still be called a comedy. With typical minimalism and little dialogue, Kaurismäki describes the bleak and desperate life of a girl who resorts to harsh and desperate actions. Effective.

Fascinating study on the horrors of being a girl cursed with having the face of Rob Halford, the Metal God.

Iris is plain, downtrodden, and stepped over by just about everybody in her life, even those who don't know her. Her situation becomes more and more dire, and just when you figure it's gonna be a piece of utterly miserablist fare...holy shit does it go in a totally unexpected direction. Kaurismaki's patience and visual storytelling, rather than inducing tedium, give this a hell of an undercurrent of tension.

Just to be clear: this isn't a comedy. The revenge is amusing but it's not funny.

From a director whose work I have seen so far has already been minimalistic, this portrayal of an alienated Finnish woman takes it further by barely having any dialogue and humour so pitch black one might be unsure whether they should laugh or not. Its not for everyone, but it is successful in what the director attempted to do.

30 Ekim 08, 23:00, yonetmenin izledigilm ilk filmi & mekanik dunyaya sessiz ama derinden bir bakis. ve en sonunda clockwork orange gondermesi cok yerinde olmus. 68 dakikalik suresi sayesinde, agir tempo sikmiyor.

True to the spirit of the Finnish modus operandi, there's very little dialogue. The characters don't care enough about each other to bother to have normal conversations. Because of this, sound effects such as a person opening a letter or lighting a cigarette seem (or perhaps they actually are) twice as loud as usual. Couple this with the long takes and few camera moves, and the sound becomes perhaps the single most defining aspect of the film.

Iris is a plain, stoic girl who works a drudge-y job in a match factory and tends to get treated rather poorly. Kaurismaki follows her around, and at first it seems a bit pointless, but the story very slowly becomes more and more interesting. There's some similarities to Ming-liang Tsai here, perhaps a "Tsai Lite". Long takes, mostly stationary camera, characters "doing nothing", and extremely dry humor.

Of the Kaurismäki films I have seen, this one is, shall we say, the purest example of his style, and several people have found this extremely black and dry comedy an upsetting experience: bleakness and grimness of it all is so excessive and shown in a way that one has to laugh at it, and then feel guilty for laughing at the symphathetic sufferer Kati Outinen...