Euthanizer (Teemu Nikki, 2017): Finland

Reviewed by Keyu Zhu. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018

Teemu Nikki’s low-budget Finnish movie euthanizer is a black humor story, it was released in Finland on November 24th, 2017, which is about an old man Veijo help people euthanize pets by shooting them in the forest. He might have some mental problems, such as saying that he can understand what pets are thinking and help pets to “punish” the owner. However, there is still a lot of people go because he charged less than the community. He has a dad who is dying in the hospital, he didn’t try his best to save his life but saying that he deserves that because he used to abuse animals. The nurse Lotta fell in love with him because of his dark and strange personality. However, the darkness of his personality didn’t get affected by Lotta’s love. Then the story became bizarre and uncontrollable as a man named Petri came to his house. The story led to the ending that the old man Veijo killed Petri in a very brutal way.

The theme of this movie is really dark and humorless, filling with a lot of violence and sex scene. There is one scene that Veijo killed Petri by burning him on fire with gas, like the way how he killed the dog he likes. He killed him in the same way he killed his dog and watched him burning. It was a thrilling and creepy, representing how an antisocial old man was showing all his dark side as the story went. Also, there is no any joke or funny scene in the movie, it is all about blood and hate. The old man wanted to let all the people who abuse their pets suffer in the same way back. If you forget your pet in a cage for so long, he thinks you should be in the cage for the same duration in order to let you realize how your pets feel who you did that to them.

The narrative style is amazing, the most interesting thing to expect is that how our agonist became the way he acted at the end of the movie, who is crucial, crazy and uncontrollable, the style and structure is actually doing very well. The genre is thriller and I think the movie might be related to the “Silence of the Lambs”, because they both are talking about two mentally ill old man and the crazy things they do. The director puts a lot of efforts in this film and the movie is very well-paced.

I personally think the movie is good because it has it own special way to narrate the story and it is very classical dark film. Everybody who watched the film with me said the movie was crazy and it was not realistic. But in my point of view, the movie might refer to the real antisocial people and psychopath’s mind. If so, it is a really good movie because it gives us insights and new point of views about what these people is thinking and behaving. The movie is a black comedy, so it is reasonable if it doesn’t make sense in the real life because it is rare.