Forest of torment – Weekend – Kommersant
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In the Russian box office, the Finnish horror Don’t Knock is a slowburner about the horrors and grievances of the Finnish forest, filmed by debutants in cinema, writer Max Sek and his friend-entrepreneur Jonas Pajunen.
Matilda (Saana Koivisto), Maria (Inka Kallen) and Mikko (Pekka Strang) have not seen each other for several years – the bond between brother and sisters weakened as they left their father’s house one after another. The reason for the reunion is not the most joyful: siblings need to enter into an inheritance and dispose of the family nest along with the adjacent forest area. The whole trinity is interested in selling real estate as soon as possible, and therefore, without delay, they go into the wilderness – they will also have to sail there by ferry – to see how many childhood memories have survived.
There is not much joy in the past – a short prologue already hints at this. 2006, young Matilda is found by the police locked in a cage, her father seems to be dead, and her mother is missing. Now the younger sister entered the medical school – in the footsteps of the middle Mary, and when she sees the family home, she recalls how her father forced her to have an abortion in her youth. Only the dendrochronologist Mikko, who is about to leave for Sweden to study the growth rings of local trees, seems to have no childhood injuries. True, he is also a little in disarray because of the long-overdue divorce, which will separate him from his two daughters. In general, for everyone this is not the best moment to be in a house in the middle of a dense forest. And possibly cursed.
What exactly lives in the Finnish thicket, debutant directors Jonas Pajunen and Max Sek, childhood friends who decided to use the pandemic with benefit, fortunately, will not be revealed. The local chton will gradually draw the heroes in, picking up the key to the hidden anxieties of each. Civilization and rationality remained on the other side of the water – something completely different begins on this shore. Mikko will discover suspicious patterns on a tree frame, Matilda will remember that her mother (Olga Koschikallio) and an elderly friend (Janina Berman) were looking for some kind of goblin and forest spirits, Maria will plunge into a gloomy haze of guilt, reproaching herself for motherhood that did not happen.
The star of the Finnish literary thriller, Sek (“Witch Hunter”) brings the audience up to speed as slowly as possible. Don’t Knock is what they call a slowburner: slow horror, whose intrigue and horror flare up gradually and flare up only at the end of the day. But, as a rule, blindingly bright. The Finnish example of unhurried horror, of course, is not like the recognized hits of Robert Eggers (“The Witch”, “The Lighthouse”) or Oz Perkins (“February”, “Gretel and Hansel”), but it was invented, we must pay tribute, quite intelligently. There is a suspicion that on paper it looked even more solid: Seck’s main cycle – about the Helsinki investigator Jessica Niemi – also instills a local mysticism in the Scandinavian noir genre with a fixation on the mother figure.
The hypothesis about the director’s inexperience can be tested very soon – when the series announced last year will be released based on the Witch Hunter. However, Sek and Pajunen also act not without dexterity, giving out information about the characters bit by bit and luring the audience into the thicket, like folklore lights – liecchio, kidnapping children’s souls. The further into the forest, the more dramatic and creepy the narrative becomes, and the finale is completely capable of knocking the ground out from under your feet. It just doesn’t let go of the feeling that a director with a more developed visual flair would clearly have made Don’t Knock the genre event of the year — as comedian Zach Cregger did in 2022 with his communal horror The Barbarian. Also, by the way, an example of “slow fire” – smoldering in the abandoned areas of Detroit. But the genre-favorite ruins of a former industrial Mecca (think of 2014’s It) in Cregger have more individuality than the sorrowful Finnish forest, where environmentalist caution is combined with pro-feminist folk horror, and hallucinations of guilt are combined with criticism of ordinary exploitation, which is subjected to and nature, and wives, and especially children.
The criticism is not exactly original, it is rather a twist with a harsh temper of the local biosphere, which unleashes bloody mirages on guests not out of harm, but in self-defense for. Selfish tenants are plotting to sell the land either for logging or for mining, and Mikko is also washing his skis towards Sweden, although he admits that the forests of his Scandinavian neighbors are not that much different. But now, as they say, it was a shame.
At the box office from March 9
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