Starring: Pekka Strang, Krista Kosonen, Ilona Huhta
Distributor: Umbrella Entertainment
Runtime: 105 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2020
| 
| 
Two alerts before the review of this film. Firstly, the subject is sado-masochism, the role of a dominatrix and her client, a subject that a number of audiences would prefer not to watch. Secondly, this is an intelligently made film, well-acted and directed, exploring a difficult subject, relationships between the experience of pain and sexuality, offering much to reflect on.
This is a Finnish film, set in Helsinki, a surgeon working in a hospital, living at home with his school-aged teenage daughter. There is a prologue, something of a nightmare, with the surgeon unable to save his wife who drowns. Her death recurs in his nightmares, in his imagination, in his regrets and judgement on himself.
Some years later, he takes his daughter to have her tongue pierced for her birthday. While he waits, he encounters a sado-masochist chamber, and is attacked by the dominatrix, Mona. This stirs something in him. He is not in any personal relationship with a partner, and he returns to an appointment with Mona. She treats him as a dog, on all fours, and he willingly concurs and acts out this game.
On the one hand, the surgeon becomes obsessed with Mona, returning for visits, for humiliation, the beatings, for pain. He becomes more remote with his daughter, not turning up at her band recital, her questioning him. At work, his colleagues are concerned and the authorities asking for a psychological assessment.
On the other hand, the film shows something of the personality of the young woman who is a dominatrix, a graphic scene with another client with candles burning on his bare back, his pain and her having to extinguish them. She allows the surgeon to return, but we see that it has something of a personal effect on her, some emotional response. She indulges the surgeon, especially with scenes of asphyxiation – where he blacks out, is taken to hospital, his daughter coming to visit him, reviving, having to wear a neck brace.
He becomes so obsessive that he waits outside the premises, follows Mona, tries to get into a sadomasochist club but is refused. He follows Mona home, asks her for more pain, and there follows, audiences probably grimacing, some pain with the prolonged extraction of a tooth with pliers.
This seems to bring the surgeon to some kind of decision, to return to hospital, to take his daughter to a Museum. However, he returns to the club – and is absorbed into lights, its music, gyrating dancing, smiling, it would seem, for the first time in the film, seeing Mona and her beginning to smile.
This is not a psychological analysis of sadomasochistic behaviour, rather a portrait, storytelling, for audiences to identify with characters, will be repelled by them, assess their behaviour, needs, motivations. This kind of film could be seen as a cry for help, an out of the depths kind of cry. However, it is also an ‘enter the void’ kind of film, little hope, no way out – and the surgeon, ultimately surrendering to the void.
Peter Malone MSC is an Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
12 Random Films…
