Finnish writer-director Hanna Bergholm makes her feature debut with this bizarre and richly designed body-horror-satire about family dysfunction, body image and eating disorders. It’s a movie which borrows a bit from others – chiefly Spielberg’s ET – but there is something brashly distinctive here as well.
We start with an Instagrammably picture-perfect family of ineffable blondness. Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is a shy tweenager who is a gymnastics competitor. Maybe there are films where gymnastics are not a metaphor for misery and self-harm but this isn’t one of them. Tinja has a cheery dad (Jani Volanen) who is a bit of a beta-male chump in his shorts and his sweater tied around his neck, and she has a brattish kid brother, Matias (OIva Ollila). But she is being driven super hard by her icily ambitious mother (Sophia Heikkilä), who has a scar on her leg hinting at her own frustrated gymnastic ambitions. And Tinja’s mum also imperiously shoots a daily vlog about her too-good-to-be-true family, entitled Lovely Everyday Life. (Bergholm must surely have considered that as a title for her film.)
