Shopping Tour (2012)

directed by Mikhail Brashinsky

Russia, Finland

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is a really good movie that for some reason I had never paid any attention to until last night. I think it's because I would see that poster of a little girl with blood smeared around her mouth and the ugly font and go "ugh, another zombie movie". If only I knew before how wrong that was. It's best to go into this blind, though, so beware.

So the main characters are a boy in his early teens and his mom taking a shopping trip to Finland along with a bus full of other Russian tourists. The relationship between the two of them is very strained due to the implied recent death of the boy's father, and the overall fact of how hard it is to be a teen and the parent of a teen. Once they get to Finland they end up in the middle of a nationwide celebration of cannibalism and violence in a hyper-real version of every international traveler's nightmare scenario: You go through the draconian ordeal of border crossing and then suddenly no one will help you and everyone is antagonistic, except now it's worse because they also want to eat you.

I suppose this could also be unpopular because it's found-footage, a subgenre which still invites knee-jerk negativity amongst a lot of viewers. Most of the footage is supposed to have been filmed on the boy's camera phone, although they do use some cuts and fade(s)-to-black that betray the "purity" of the found-footage aesthetic. But this movie has a unique perspective. I can't think offhand of any other movies intended for adults where the main characters are a teen and his mom. You would think it would get annoying quickly and not be suitable fodder for an entire film, but Shopping Tour goes all in on this concept and is essentially a character study of the two before it introduces its main premise. There's something deeply genuine about the way they're depicted constantly bickering, constantly thinking the other one is wrong and they're right, that they know more than each other. It's a realistic and realistically flawed relationship where you can tell that it's two people who love each other but are currently inhabiting the worst period of each other's life. This isn't the kind of relationship you typically see depicted on film, and if you do, it usually doesn't introduce cannibals at any point.

Once the whole cannibal thing started getting going, this started to feel much more like A Movie™. I was hoping the stark realism would carry over into that part of the film and we would get some uniquely harrowing scenes handled with the same degree of naked tragedy and emotion as the rest of it, but all in all it's not that original. Which is fine, I still had fun. It's original enough that the parts where it dials it in don't matter as much. When the first person dies there's no solid divide between that moment and the rest of the movie, and I thought that was really great- no build-up, no prior warning, and the format prevents it from using any overwrought musical sting. You just see somebody get brutally killed all of a sudden and then all hell breaks loose. The sound design leaves something to be desired big time (there is a Wilhelm scream) but aesthetically the violence was on point.

The first death also signals a really sharp turn into comedy that did clash a little with its previous seriousness, but somehow it works well. This is all super blatant anti-Finnish propaganda but it is honestly very funny, and I'm hoping it's all in jest, as a person with Finnish ancestry. I mean, it purports that every Finn is some kind of cannibal pagan who practices a midsummer ritual involving a total free-for-all of murder and people-eating. It is not kind to the Finnish at all, but it is very funny about it.

And the question of what exactly these people are is something I'm thinking about even after the movie has ended. We get an explanation of the fake cannibal festival that is surprisingly in-depth considering the small scope of the film, but there's something weird and trope-defying about the method to the Finns' madness. They don't act like typical Texas Chainsaw cannibals who lure you in with hospitality and then kill you and eat you for dinner, they're more akin to the classic zombie in that they just bite and eat people in the streets, but they're also in full possession of their faculties, and cannot spread their flesh-eating tendencies via a bite. (This is proven by an unfortunate Pakistani guy who married a Finnish woman, knowing of her nature and reaching an agreement with her, but finds that all bets are off once she dies.) I think movies like this that are based around an old idea but manage to execute it with a huge amount of innovation and also an engaging and emotionally stirring human element are extremely impressive. I can't say this was perfect from all angles but I laughed at it, I felt moved by the main characters, and I was interested in the lore behind it. There's something inherently amusing about a movie where the monsters are just Finnish people gone rogue.