Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Little Siberia’ on Netflix, an Odd Finnish Dramedy About a Small-town Pastor Wrestling With His Faith, and a Meteorite

One little rock from outer space upends a small snowy town in Little Siberia, the first-ever Finnish film production from Netflix. Director/co-writer Dome Karukoski’s (Tolkien) odd and gently baffling little film opens with the Big Bang, then zooms in and in and in and in (and in) until a little chunk of space debris rockets through the atmosphere and tips the local pastor’s crisis of faith into a full-blown catastrophe. I HATE when that happens, and also when a crisis of faith/full-blown catastrophe is surrounded by a bunch of other strange stuff, although that stuff might just be colloquial Finland in action. Hard to tell from over here in America, where it’s sometimes difficult to translate foreign comedy into laughs.

LITTLE SIBERIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This guy, he’s drifting between all the drifts. That’s Tarvainen (Tommi Korpela), the local drunk, quaffing booze and pointing his rally car right at a big rock and stomping on the gas. I think he’s about to kill himself when POW! He slams on his brakes, looks at the passenger seat and sees a hole about the size of a softball scorched in it, then looks up at a similar hole in the roof of the car. This is the quaint rural village of Hurmevaara, which translates to “Charmville,” and reminds me of the road-trip vacation I once took where the running joke was that every little town we passed had a “historic” main street downtown. Hurmevaara has a church and a little museum and a dance studio and a bar/restaurant and a small population that’s used to the cold and uses kick-sleds to get around. If there’s a local industry upon which the town operates, it isn’t revealed, but it probably has something to do with snow – skiing tourism, or maybe ice fishing. Not that it really matters. Why does anybody do anything anywhere, anyway? You end up asking this kind of question when a movie opens with the Big Bang.

Now we meet our protagonist, Joel (Eero Ritala), the local pastor, new to the village, as he tries to get his wife Krista (Malla Malmivaara) pregnant. He’s a sad sack, and I say that in bad taste, since he injured a testicle while serving in the military and is unable to father children, a fact that he hasn’t shared with Krista. It’s his own damn fault, really, but it’s a rock/hard place situation, because he loves her and doesn’t want to lose her, so will telling her the truth or withholding the truth make things worse? Coin flip. He’s also privy to the existential meanderings of a local gentleman, Matias (Martti Suosalo), who frets about massive problems like armageddon and overpopulation, then asks Joel, “What is God’s plan?” – and expects an answer. Joel wriggles out of it as all pastors do, with vague language and circular logic, which come in handy  especially when pastors wrestle with their own uncertainties about the everythingness of everything and whether it has meaning or not.

Now, this meteorite. It’s kept in the local museum – which is mostly full of war antiquities – and the subject of far more practical debate since it’s purportedly worth a million Euro. Tarvainen thinks it should be his and his alone. The townsfolk think they should sell it so everyone in Hurmevaara can benefit. One thing’s for sure: The thing ain’t safe sitting in a glass box at the museum. For reasons that are lost on me, Joel ends up taking the overnight shift babysitting the rock, and sure enough, ski-masked thieves break in and sock him one – not the first time he’ll suffer injury during violent confrontations – and R-U-N-N-O-F-T but end up blowing some of themselves up because it was dark they didn’t realize they snatched a hand grenade instead of the meteorite. So it goes. Other suspicious types seem to be circling the meteorite, too, so there’s a lot of pressure on Joel to keep the thing safe. Meanwhile, Krista tells him she’s pregnant, so now he has two mysteries to solve. I mean, nobody’s killing anyone when there’s no bullets in the pistol, right? But all it takes is one, and sure enough, by the end of the film, Joel ends up running around with a gun with only one bullet in it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The frigid northern climate and Joel’s lack of sleep from his attempt to balance his daytime religious duties with his nighttime security-guard duties brings to mind Insomnia – if it was cross-bred with the frigid northern climate and quirky characters of Fargo.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s hard not to like Ritala as our bewildered protagonist. He seems capable of elevating material when a screenplay isn’t asking him to benchpress a Buick.

Memorable Dialogue: Joel reveals his wavering commitment to the guy above when debating with Matias whether the meteorite is a miracle:

Matias: Yeah, that meteorite fell from the sky.

Joel: That’s where they usually fall from.

Matias: Yes. From heaven. From there. From God.

Joel: Or from outer space.

Sex and Skin: A brief PG-13-level sex scene.

Our Take: Joel is a classic put-upon protagonist with a twist – he looks the part of a schlubby pastor, but is a war veteran who knows a hand-to-hand move and can wield a firearm effectively. That doesn’t prevent him, or anyone really, from getting their ass whooped, which happens a few times, and I think is supposed to be funny, which it is, sort of. People underestimate Joel, but the movie doesn’t do enough with this dynamic, or the sense that he seems to consistently underestimate himself. He’s in a funk, and all the too much everything of the plot is either going to sink him deeper or pull him out of it; such is the primary arc of this story.

But it can be difficult to cull the wheat from the chaff of Little Siberia, which functions like a scattergun when a sniper might be more effective. The point is to overwhelm poor Joel with crazy circumstances that’ll either push him further from his ideological home base or closer to it. The story lacks a necessary focus to keep our eyes from goggling a bit, and Karukoski aims for a less-cynical Coen Bros. vibe, but can’t seem to bullseye the target.

It veers between two types of movie plot: The Herding Cats Plot, where Joel tries to maintain some semblance of control of his life, but struggles because too many things are occurring at once, and his problems are exacerbated when he’s caught in the mechanics of a frustrating screenplay that forces him to make dumb decisions and play Comedy Movie Games when he should be, you know, having a conversation. The other is the Wait Wait I Can Explain Plot, which puts Joel in near-impossible situations that make him look guilty of crimes or indiscretions when he’s clearly innocent; weirdly, the movie just drops some of this stuff without any follow-through or revolution (at one point, Joel is covered with blood and there’s a dead body in a car, and nobody, not even cops or wives, seems particularly interested in finding out what happened). It’s worth noting that comedy can spring from regular, non-wacky situations, and anything else often comes off desperate.

Add in a few too many characters – the hunky gym guy, the femme fatale bartender, the town drunk, the beefy gent with a big knife, etc. – and you have a bit too much stuff for one movie. Little Siberia has two things going for it: A touch of lighthearted thematic ambition, and Ritala’s performance, which keenly balances silly and serious, and sets the tone for the rest of the film. But there’s a point where the comedy doesn’t seem funny enough and the drama doesn’t seem dramatic enough, as if Karukoski frequently struggled to keep the semi on the pavement. Oh, and the meteorite is just a MacGuffin. I tried to find deeper symbolic-metaphorical meaning out of it, but it’s just a thing that gets things moving in sleepy little “Charmsville.” It turns out, this town needed an enema.

Our Call: I wanted to like the quirky-thoughtful Little Siberia more than I did – it’s a classic case of unfocused writing derailing a good idea. But I hesitate to turn you too far away from it, so here’s a waffling assessment: 51% SKIP IT, 49% STREAM IT, which is a way of saying you might like it despite its flaws, if you give it a shot.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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