Kuisma ja Helinä Review - Beautiful, Melodramatic, and Very Slow

If you are looking for a fast-paced movie to watch on a Friday night, stay far away from this one. But if you love old, dusty dramas where people communicate entirely through *aggressive squinting*, you might actually enjoy this old Finnish relic.

Honestly, most modern viewers will probably find it boring. It is slow, and the tragedy is something you can see coming from a mile away. 🌲

The story is simple enough. Helinä is a maid who is basically kept as a wife by Isma, who is just the most miserable guy in the world.

Then Kuisma rolls into town. He is a Cossack, he has a cool hat, and he instantly makes eye contact with Helinä.

And that is basically the whole movie: people looking at each other. But how they look at each other is what makes it fun.

It has that heavy-handed silent movie energy, even though it has sound. It reminds me a bit of The Blindness of Love, where every emotion is dialed up to an eleven.

I love how Isma spends most of his screen time just vibrating with rage. He does not even need to speak; his eyebrows do all the acting for him.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Kuisma ja Helinä (1932) through its definitive frames.

There is this one scene where Kuisma and Helinä are by the water. The wind is blowing, the birch trees are shaking, and it feels incredibly romantic in a very old-fashioned way.

But then the camera cuts back to Isma hiding in the bushes. He looks like a cartoon villain, but somehow it still works because the actor is so commited.

Also, a very young Tauno Palo shows up in a small role! If you know Finnish cinema, you know he is a legend, so seeing him here is like finding a Easter egg. 🥚

The movie does get a bit draggy in the middle. It feels like they had about forty minutes of story and had to stretch it out with long walks through the forest.

It definitly has some of that raw, unpolished feeling you get in early talkies, similar to Mother from around that era.

Some of the edit choices are just plain weird. One transition cuts so fast from a quiet moment to a loud musical cue that it made me jump. 😅

Things I wrote down in my notebook:

• That mustache on Kuisma is a work of art. It deserves its own credit in the cast list.
• The background characters look like they were grabbed off the street and told to "look natural" which they absolutely do not do.
• The sound quality is pretty rough, like everyone is speaking into a tin can. But it adds to the charm.
• The ending is indeed "bad" for everyone involved, but boy, they go out with maximum drama.

It is not a masterpiece, and the pacing is definitely clunky. But there is a weird, dark magic to these old Finnish melodramas that you just cannot find anymore.