Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Rare Exports is a fascinating movie, albeit probably not for the reasons they intended. I'm sure the creators intended for this to be a captivating adventure about the original Finnish myth of Santa Claus -- a beastly mini-kaiju creature that blended our current idea of Santa with Krampus all in one -- being unearthed from a frozen tomb and running amok in a small village in the Arctic area of Finland. I imagine they had this idea of using the myth and building around it, with Santa's "helpers" being shriveled old men turned into mindless rage zombies, and a young boy being the one to figure it all out and foil the plot to resurrect the monstrous punisher of the naughty. The atmosphere is there. The build is there. The characters are there. There's a nice story arc about this young boy going from afraid and meek to strong and capable, while his dad -- struggling to raise the boy by himself after his wife died -- has to balance being a single dad with trying to make a living in the frozen wilderness and feeling like he's losing control of everything. There are a lot of good elements in Rare Exports. But they're in service of a movie that fumbles the ball in the final act, because it forgets one thing: horror movies need to build to something. It doesn't need to be an all-out bloodbath, or some explosive, apocalyptic finale, but it does need to build to something, and Rare Exports doesn't seem to know that. There isn't a showdown with Santa; he remains stuck in a block of ice. The "elves" are easily thwarted. Nobody important dies. The finale finds a way to wrap up everything in a bow without anything actually happening along the way, or any major sacrifice. It's like a roller coaster that climbs that first, long hill, levels off, and then stays flat like a public transportation train, until it gradually comes back down to the loading dock again. All the build is for nothing. Except that analogy isn't even quite correct, because the epilogue ... wow, holy hell, that epilogue murders any good will this movie might've earned by bringing the father and son together and restoring the spirit of Christmas by turning the cast of the movie into reprehensible monsters. They capture all of Santa's elves, clean them up, forcibly train them to be mall Santas, and ship them in crates all around the world. Yes, the heroes become human traffickers. Merry Christmas, everybody! The spirit of the holidays is alive and well! I was along for the ride for a while, waiting for some carnage, some excitement, something, anything to happen to make Rare Exports worth it, but it never pays off. It takes great pains, in fact, to avoid making anything happen, and then rewards blue-balling the viewer by making the people we follow, the ostensible heroes, imprison human beings who had lives before becoming Santa's minions and turn them into cargo. I wouldn't have given this a great review without that epilogue, but it would've been a passable if forgettable movie on that basis. With the epilogue, it is a catastrophic misfire that left a terrible taste in my mouth when it was over.