Yo dawg, I heard you like sad movies so we made you this...

Priest of Evil - Harjunpää ja pahan pappi (2010)

This is a movie based on the popular Harjunpää books and the movie was planned as kind of an Finnish alternate for the Beck and Wallander series. I can't compare them as I really haven't seen any that I could remember. Well the makers of this have surely studied Se7en (1995) as the movie tries to imitate it in style and in mood. Timo Harjunpää is a police detective whose life is not easy, his daughter gets murdered, his marriage is falling apart and there's a serial killer after him. Soon even the killer of his daughter is being released from prison, so there's no shortage of drama and tragedy. Actually there's so much of them that it almost turns into a farce. It wallows in the sad feelings underlining every single moment of sadness so thoroughly that the whole movie becomes unintentionally hilarious. For example a scene which is probably supposed to show how teenagers deal with family problems is of course depicted with an emo kid slashing his forearm. I mean come on, at least I can't watch that scene without laughing. It also doesn't help that Helsinki is depicted as a very grim and dangerous place where the sun doesn't shine. It pretty much takes every cliche out there and slaps it into the soup. As a dark comedy this story would have worked quite well, but as it really tries to keep it serious it's just sad how over board it goes. Add to that all the ridiculous details and you have a movie that's almost so bad it's good, but not quite. The cast is pretty much the all star of Finnish actors and most of them do a fairly ok job. Peter Franzen seems quite lost most of the time though, but then again I guess that's what they were after in the first place. Jenni Banerjee gives out a surprisingly bad performance and maybe is a bit mis cast for the part of Harjunpää's partner. Techical side of the movie wasn't all great either. The dialog sound is really messed up and on many points it's hard to hear what the people are saying. Other than that the movie looks good and is fairly well made, except for one quite bad prostethic effect. The movie also makes quite a few religious remarks and keeps it as one of it's themes, but really have to wonder what's the point of it all. I mean first the movie spends 90 minutes showing us how religion can mess people's heads and then in the end it basically says religion will save you. If it was meant to be hypocritic then sure it works well, but I have a feeling it really wasn't. Anyway, I didn't get bored at any part and surely enough it left me a lot to think about, though mostly about how bad the movie was, so I guess it was worth the watch. But surely enough won't recommend it to anyone unless you're really bored and wish to see in how bad shape the Finnish movies are today.
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