The White Reindeer (1952)
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Stumbled across this somewhere on the internet, looked it up and it sounded interesting so bought the above dvd.
A little known Finnish film that was apparently shown at Cannes at the time and won a golden globe award but has since faded into obscurity.
Set in a small community living in a snowy bleak landscape, where not much seems to go on that doesn't involve reindeers, the locals herd them, hunt them and race them.
During a race a man and woman end up falling down a hill together and falling in love, he asks her father for her hand and they get married, so everything's great right? well no actually.
He has to go off for long spells in to the wilderness hunting i guess, so the wife is left alone and lonely.
It's not long before she goes to a local shaman type bloke and asks him to make her a spell, i thought it was to make her husband stay with her at first but it seems to have the effect of getting all the blokes around to fancy her.
To get the spell to work she sacrifices a reindeer at a shrine surrounded by reindeer horns.
A side effect is that she ends up turning into a reindeer on occasions and luring men off and killing them.
So what we have here is essentially a werewolf type story of a curse and transformations. But the young woman spouts fangs in certain scenes (do reindeer have fangs??
) so in some scenes she seems vampiric.
The story is told from the wife's perspective so we feel for her and watch as she goes through the realisation that she is cursed, the actress gives a nice performance that i found mesmerising.
The lighting in the creepier scenes is dark and shadowy and i found these moments quite striking.
The landscape is shot beautifully and the life and customs of the rural inhabitants is interesting and that gives the film a really unusual feel.
There is also a haunting song that adds a lot of atmosphere to certain scenes.
The story is slight and the film is pretty short at just over an hour but i really enjoyed it, there isn't any effects in the transformation scenes and no bloodletting, but instead we get a nuanced, folklore/fairytale style film with horror elements.
I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to film fans who enjoy the old Universal black and white horror / Val Lewton films or world cinema.
The dvd i have is pictured above, it has a pretty decent picture and english subtitles.
I loved it. 9/10
