Mostly just dull and meandering. Whole thing feels like a badly-planned-out project; visually daring to no apparent end, and essentially little more than a shaggy dog story dragged on by two long scenes of people recounting events more interesting than what actually happens in the movie. Pure style over substance type stuff; formal experimentation without any real sense of what that experimentation is pointing towards or what it's doing in the context of this story specifically.

It's like if Challengers (2024) was a 45 minute long made-for-HBO comedy.

A fun little romp through a psychosexual hall of mirrors. Written, essentially, like an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation but with significantly more nipple play than usual.

I wish this picked at its scabs more? It's one of those horror movies where there's no first-act normalcy; we go from zero to unsettling immediately, and from there pretty soon to horrific. But it feels like it's missing that final step, that last rung down the ladder. Absent that it ends up just being a pretty good movie about, largely, an evil pack of feral rich people.

At one point in this movie, Kati Outinen—the star of some of Kaurismäki's early films back in the late eighties, including the incredible and incredibly depressing Match Factory Girl—shows up for a brief cameo playing a glowering cashier at a miserable Helsinki supermarket. This is such a feel-bad movie that seeing her felt like a ray of goddamn sunshine.

A recurring theme for Kaurismäki is characters trying to scrape away the subtext of their relationships; approaching what they want with complete bluntness, as if they don't have time for flirting or skirting the issue. Here, this dynamic is a weapon. It's a noir without the ambiguity; you see exactly what Maria Järvenhelmi's reluctant femme fatale is doing, the entire way.

And on the other side of that, the sad-sack protagonist (Janne Hyytiäinen) sees it too. No one in this movie has any illusions about it; it's like they've seen the movie before, and they're living through a recurrence that reduces the events of their lives to mere facts.

Real brick of a movie. Three and a half stars.