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.

This feels like a difficult transition; whereas before in Match Factory Girl, Ariel, and Shadows in Paradise, Kaurismäki was working with a group of actors who seemed so perfectly and completely in tune with his sensibilities, here everyone seems to be coming at the challenge from a slightly off-kilter angle.

Kaurismäki is stretching in a lot of ways; he's depicting a setting that's new to him, he's casting actors who are new to him, he's working in a language he hadn't done a full feature in before. It's all ultimately in service of watching Jean-Pierre Léaud build a character scene by scene, slowly finding things for his shattered salaryman to hold on to for (very literally) dear life.

Still a great watch; Léaud is of course incredible here, but so is relative unknown Margi Clarke and long-tenured English character actor Kenneth Colley (you may recognize him as one of sundry imperial officers in Star Wars). And as always, Kaurismäki has this incredible property of holding your attention with a movie that feels almost unyielding in its quietness so that he can catch you entirely off-guard with a joke or a moment of unexpected tenderness.

Very glad to have seen this in a theater!