An over-extended slice of Scandinavian miserabilism, writer/director Aku Louhimies' Frozen Land is inspired by the Tolstoy novella The Forged Coupon. Split up into interconnecting chapters, the Helsinki-set drama incorporates alcoholism, suicide, murder, bereavement and drug addiction. The end result is imitative, icily unengaging, and without the poker-faced humour of Louhimies's fellow Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki.

Bookended by a funeral, Frozen Land borrows from Bresson's L'Argent the device of a counterfeit bank note, which is circulated amongst the various characters, to symbolize bad luck being passed between human beings. A teenage forger (Pääkkönen) passes off the fake money at a cheap store, where it ends up in the pocket of a none-too-bright car-thief Isto (Mikko Kouki), who later teams up with the lugubrious vacuum-cleaner salesman Teuvo (Sulevi Peltolta) on the mother of all benders. The chain extends to Nico's boozing unemployed Dad and to the adolescent's hacker friends, whose paths fatefully cross with a female cop (Kuusniemi) and her young family.

"BITTERLY PESSIMISTIC"

Unfortunately Louhimies has a tendency to spell out to the audience the film's ideas: one teacher gives a class on fate in Tolstoy, another on chaos theory, whilst there are snatches of background dialogue such as "the only sure thing is death." Its bitterly pessimistic philosophy is strangely undercut by Nico's tame closing speech about how things work out for the best.

In Finnish with English subtitles