Cannes Review: Mikko Myllylahti’s ‘The Woodcutter Story’
deadline.comThere is a sort of checklist for Finnish films — and I say this with love — that includes snowy exteriors, bleakly austere interiors, ice fishing and someone getting murdered with an axe.
The Woodcutter Story ticks every box, plus a few more. Characters who barely speak, for example — and who may, indeed, have nothing to say.
When they do, there is a jolting humor that may not be humor at all: their deadpan delivery gives nothing away. This is the Finnish way.Director/writer Mikko Myllylahti — a poet who also penned the script for Juho Kuosmanen’s The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki, which won a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 — sets his Cannes Critics’ Week title in an unnamed village in the far north of Finland clustered around a timber mill.
Myllylahti’s hero Pepe is a timber worker, played by the same actor who brought such humanity to Olli Maki, Jarkko Lahti. Pepe is a radiant innocent, beloved by all.
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