THE STANDARD "KILLER IN THE WOODS" STORY TURNS INTO SOMETHING SO MUCH MORE
★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)
Director: Taneli Mustonen
2016
At what point in a horror film does a character’s background no longer justify the wretched things they do? I’ve glossed over this conundrum in Silent Night, Deadly Night, but you can’t escape it in Bodom (also knowns as Lake Bodom), a film chock full of so many twists and turns I can only discuss the original matter at hand from the first act. Centered around Finland’s most mysterious unsolved murders—four teens attacked in the woods in 1960—I feared I was about to watch yet another cheap hiker slasher flick, but there is a budget here and it’s just not spent on campers gallivanting in the woods. It’s spent on the adrenaline-charged third act, so don’t get too bored with those high-schoolers acting up in front of a roaring fire. Deft camerawork gives you the familiar and still makes it chilling. What starts out as a standard spooky forest turns into a life-or-death struggle rarely seen in horror.
Decades after an attack that left three teen campers dead, the whodunit legend of what happened at Lake Bodom is still alive, especially with amateur sleuths Elias (Mikael Gabriel) and Atte (Santeri Helinheimo Mäntylä), two guys who might be up to no good when they invite Ida (Nelly Hirst-Gee) and Nora (Mimosa Willamo) to go camping overnight with them. The girls are told it’s a nice trip to a cabin; they don’t know that they’re being used as guinea pigs in an experiment to find the 1960s killer. Ida has already had a rough year without this prank. Six months before, at a party, she was drugged and photographed naked, and the entire school has given her grief about these photos ever since. She’s not just getting bullied at school. At home, her Christian father, who lords over his house with fear, has put the blame on her and deemed her sullied, so she’s been grounded for months. Best friends Nora and Ida want to take this opportunity with Elias and Atte to sneak Ida out of her home for the night. It’s a rare treat.
Much is made of the ordeal Ida has been through in regards to the nudes, and this is an unexpected mystery added on to the one that haunts Lake Bodom. The girl is scarred, a product of today’s weaponized technology. The UK nonprofit Internet Matters and the Youthworks charity found that 14% of teens surveyed were pressured to sent naked pictures. An MTV study showed that 15% of American teens have sent explicit video or photos. Ida is being punished for a crime her peers committed. I know I sound like I dislike teenagers in my reviews, but I always go off my memories of being one (yes, I can still remember). At my school, we were all insensitive until we weren’t; we said terrible things to teachers and to our friends. We were still children learning what not to do, what was appropriate so we could graduate into the real-world socially aware. Acting a fool in the real-world could lose you your job, your scholarship, your marriage. Our brains were not formed yet, and I cannot imagine what my experience would have been like with 24-hour surveillance in the hands of my idiot classmates and my idiot self. Thanks to hormones and outside influences, kids that age cannot control their emotions and think they’re invincible, so to come across one that is a psychopath is especially scary.
Bodom gives us our psychopath, gives us our axe-murderer in the woods—they’re just not the same person.
“DEFT CAMERAWORK GIVES YOU THE FAMILIAR AND STILL MAKES IT CHILLING. WHAT STARTS OUT AS A STANDARD SPOOKY FOREST TURNS INTO A LIFE-OR-DEATH STRUGGLE RARELY SEEN IN HORROR.”
The real Lake Bodom murders involved two 15-year-old girls and their 18-year-old boyfriends. Sometime after four in the morning, an unknown assailant stabbed and bludgeoned them inside their tent, and only one of the male campers escaped with facial injuries. This young man was found of top of the tent, and he claimed that the killer was an unknown male with red eyes, dressed in black. Hard for me to believe, and I’m not the only one. Years later, this survivor was charged with the murders, but acquitted and paid by Finland for his troubles. According to the jury, there was no evidence of motive, which tells me the jury had little imagination—a teenager barely needs a reason for the things they do. Like those involved in the case still sure or unsure of his guilt, the characters in Bodom toy with your alliances. By the climax, I was numb and felt used. Bodom‘s dramatic storyline has the same message as the real-life Bodom murders: It’s complicated.
GENRES: Atmospheric, Feminist-Friendly, LGBTQ+, Serial Killer
NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this website's (nicolinatorres.com) blog posts or publications to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
Comments