Rakkaudella, Maire (1999)

I must confess that I don't watch Finnish movies that often. And sadly, I remembered why when I saw Rakkaudella, Maire (Veikko Aaltonen), a gloomy film about a middle-aged woman who is obsessed with a woman whose husband has been killed. The biggest flaw is perhaps the script: the story shifts from social drama to some kind of surreal, hallucinatory state but this transition is not convincing (actually, the progression of the film is a bit clumsy). The writing seems overwrought and all conflicts are too crudely played out so that in every scene one knows exactly what is going on and what is going to happen next (even though the beginning of the film was quite interesting and promising). The acting is ok, and Susanne Ringell's performance is so good that I start to wish that the writer would have focused on her character instead. That would have been an entirely different story, and an entirely different fim.