The White Reindeer (1952)

The White Reindeer (1952) Directed by Erik Blomberg

Somehow Bergman metaphysics when Bergman metaphysics wasn’t even a thing yet. Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer is perhaps too abstract in its folkloric gobbledygook for my taste, yet its pagan reveries, exceptional ethnographic photography of the Finnish snowy scenery and mesmerizing Joik melody, floored me. Rich, brooding cultural filmmaking about Pirita (Mirjami Kuosmanen), a winsome traditional Finnish woman who seeks to rekindle her relationship with her estranged husband through a magical ritual – a potion made from a bizarre natural potpourri of ingredients – which ends up yielding the opposite result of what she was looking for. The only thing that Pirita’s act of desperation to ignite the passion of her marriage engendered was a sort of theriomorphic curse – she now has the unholy powers of a witch, transforming herself into an ominous white reindeer. The plot functions more like a mythological lyric than a film with a narrative structure, spawning pure terror with its polytheistic imagery alone and its inclement cold location. It’s the kind of arthouse film that you value more for its metaphysical closeness to the events than its physical remoteness to the proceedings.

Erik Blomberg’s effective direction embodies one of the most exquisite aesthetic dichotomies I’ve seen in European art cinema, that of employing the cinematic apparatus as a naturalistic device to enhance a supernatural and expressionistic milieu. Whether you like this kind of aesthetic paradoxes or not, the quasi-silent performances and the animism of its visuals force you to ignore its antithetical forms, and with very little -but a lot of technical astuteness- the film manages to cast a spell on you. The White Reindeer’s Nordic mythology purports to be a horror fable at the expense of the economy of its hauntingly beautiful imagery, and ultimately it consummates its literary objectives, but it develops them not with the logic of a film but with the rationale of a poem. It works within its own folkloric framework, away from it and analyzed outside of it, it looks like one of the great failed masterworks of Finnish art cinema, but a great one, nonetheless.