Little Siberia

 The Finnish neo-noir, Little Siberia (Dome Karokoski,  2025) demonstrates the broad influence of the Coen Brothers' Fargo in world cinema.  This modest film clearly employs a narrative template established by Fargo.  The template is pretty good and the movie, therefore, is reasonably entertaining.  

Little Siberia is set in the icy boondocks in Finland in a hamlet that looks like many junction villages in northern Minnesota.  The village stands in a pine forest and possesses a few commercials buildings that look like pole-barns, houses and structures scattered around a sloping main street that local navigate on small scooter-shaped sleds.  It's always icy and the characters spend almost more time falling than they do speaking.  The villagers are mostly morose eccentrics. Everyone seems dogged by the bad weather -- it is always overcast and snowing.  The town's pastor is a nondescript pale man with a haunted look.  (The film employs the laziest of all post 9-11 cliches -- he's a combat veteran of Afghanistan and, therefore, depressed but also equipped with certain military skills.)  The Finnish church seems to have next to nothing to do with religion; the pastor basically serves as a psychological counselor and social worker.  The pastor's genitals were wrecked somehow in the war and his sperm are not viable.  This condition leads to consternation when the pastor's attractive wife (she's a fitness and dance instructor) discovers she's pregnant.  The pastor has never bothered to tell his wife about his reproductive dysfunction -- the Finns are a taciturn group.  But, when his wife announces her pregnancy, the film's hero, reasonably enough thinks he's been cuckolded.  The primary premise for the film's violent action is that a meteorite has landed near town, indeed, penetrated the car body of a drunk who was planning suicide only to be interrupted by the falling star from the sky.  The meteorite, a chunk of stone about fist-sized, is believed to be fantastically valuable.  The rock is displayed in the local museum but has to be watched around the clock because a gang of Russian thugs have resolved to steal the meteorite and sell it for profit.  The pastor, due to his military background, is persuaded to guard the museum, an activity that involves various midnight assaults and attempts to snatch the stone.  Criminality corrupts the town and pretty soon people are threatening one another and taking hostages, bad behavior all involving the town's sole treasure, the meteorite.  There are a couple of murders, a duel with sharp icicles, and, at last, the treasure (like the money in Fargo) is lost, but, nonetheless, possibly accessible to someone who knows where it is located.  

Little Siberia is marketed as a "black comedy" -- it's not comical at all and, in fact, is simply a serviceable crime movie involving some eccentric characters and bursts of surprising violence.  There's nothing in this trifle that you haven't seen before.