I've taken the liberty by using Google Translate to translate the ONLY article by the Finnish movie critic Niko Jutila. It allows us to understand what's this movie is all about:
The Mother (Original Finnish title: Äiti) tells the story of a woman played by Jaana Saarinen who has been in prison for the last few years for killing her husband. After reaching parole, she now begins to look for her adult daughter in her former hometown.
Although it is not told in the film, the events are apparently set back in the past a few years ago - a time when information about every person could not be found on the internet. However, this is not an epoch: only the absence of smartphones and the old computer of the employment agency tells of the past, everything else is unmistakably present.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if Mother is a tragicomedy glazed with plenty of black humor or just an unintentionally comic gloom. The very silent woman played by Saarinen has somehow ended up in the strangest small town in Finland, where all the people she meets are either crazy or exploitative. So the film is by no means credible or realistic, even if the filming style strives for it. As the film goes further and these problems start to pile up, the whole pack starts to fall apart. The same flaw was also in Äkära, and both would certainly have worked better as short films.
The Mother has earned her praise on her own because she has a company and a clear potential in the perpetrators. Despite the obvious shortcomings of the film, Batal and his partners have tried to make just the right film and their own thing, and not just imitate American films. The role performances are good enough even for amateurs, and everything shows the sense of responsibility and serious attitude to their work, which is also needed in film making. "
