With his second fiction feature, Raptures [+lee también:
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Excuse this sounding patronising, but if the Lutheran revival movement Laestadianism was unfamiliar to you, wait till you hear about the breakaway Korpela sect, which was supposedly similar but for a few nominal elements, although it brought the whole community – crucially, Finns who resisted fully integrating into Swedish society – into disrepute. And in a wonderfully authentic touch, the dialogue is primarily spoken in Meänkieli, a Finnic language unique to the Torne River region where the film is set, and where Blåhed hails from.

The depiction of historical events – and the Korpela movement’s descent into cult-dom familiar from the fringe of US evangelicalism – is followed closely to the letter, but Blåhed (taking inspiration from a novel by Bengt Pohjanen) wisely tracks the story through a fictional couple, Rakel (Jessica Grabowsky) and Teodor (Jakob Öhrman). The former is an earnest, but principled, schoolteacher, and her other half is an upstanding community man, who later takes advantage of a power vacuum once Toivo Korpela leaves the movement he inaugurated.

What ensues is an often familiar and predictable, yet still engaging, investigation of coercion, radicalisation and masculinity at its most putridly toxic. First, Teodor adapts the apocalyptic Book of Daniel to invoke the coming end of days, with the outlandish yet creative golden ark to Palestine whipping up a new frenzy of devotion and longed-for transcendence. With Rakel watching on, and feeling guilty for failing to conceive a child to add to her step-daughter from Teodor’s previous marriage, he falls into a drunken stupor and disturbingly begins pursuing the community’s other women.

Teodor is thankfully apprehended eventually, yet the most persuasive work by Blåhed is how the picture places these occurrences in a wider context; indeed, it makes the Korpela movement’s decline seem like one evil among many. Contemporary politics has been overtaken once again by nativist populism; even in this cross-Scandinavian part of the world, misunderstood as homogenous to outsiders, assimilation and the decimation of culture and heritage are insisted upon. With the subtitles colour-coded to indicate Meänkieli, Finnish and Swedish, the sound of the latter is always characterised as a threat.

Beyond this, viewers both from the region and not will be reminded of the recent “elevated” horrors Midsommar and The Witch [+lee también:
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Raptures is a Finnish-Swedish production, staged by Iris Film AB in co-production with Rabbit Films Oy. Its world sales are handled by Picture Tree International.