Best known as the home town of Father Christmas, Rovaniemi is perhaps not an obvious setting for crime, corruption and murder.
But the unique lighting conditions, climate, nature, architecture and atmosphere of the capital of Finnish Lapland, a city of 64,000 that lies right on the Arctic Circle, is contributing to the evolution of its very own Nordic noir sub-genre.
“Reindeer noir” (reindeer noirissa) – the term coined to describe the emerging category – was characterised by “a hint of dark humour” and a “localised feel”, said Ida Tirkkonen, a film commissioner for Film Lapland.
Small communities also played a central role, she said. “The relationships between these communities and people create strong characters that differ quite a lot to what we are used to seeing on screen.” A reflection of their environment, characters were often “rugged, down to earth and unexpectedly multilayered”, she added.
Among the genre’s biggest releases to date is Arctic Circle (known in Finland as Ivalo, after the Arctic village), the third season of which will be released internationally in the spring. Featuring the Russian mafia, police officers on snow scooters and unforgiving landscapes, the crime drama makes full use of its northerly location close to the border with Russia.
Others include the 2023 series Reindeer Mafia (Poromafia), a crime drama with dark humour about a family power struggle based on a book by Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen, and 66th North Precinct, a series based on real crime cases in Lapland.
Jussi Hiltunen, who directed season two of Arctic Circle, filmed in Rovaniemi in 2020, said that having grown up in the city, it was difficult to gauge how the area had influenced his work. But his first professionally made short film, All Hallows’ Week (Hiljainen Viikko), was based on what he witnessed during a shootout outside a nightclub in Rovaniemi in 2008.
Looking out at the Kemijoki river, which runs through the city and is crossed by the landmark Lumberjack’s Candle Bridge (Jätkänkynttilän silta), the snow-covered footpath busy with people making the most of the brief sunlight, he said his first feature, Law of the Land, was also set in Lapland but ended up being shot in Norway due to costs.
“The infrastructure here is still quite small so from the production companies’ point of view it’s quite expensive to come here to shoot because there’s no [big] production companies here, so they have to bring everything from elsewhere,” he said.
But the unique quality of the region was palpable on screen, said the 39-year-old. He said his latest crime series, Evilside, an “archipelago thriller” shot in Oulu, a city about a 220km drive south of Rovaniemi, “looks amazing. When you watch it, it feels like it really is shot in Lapland”.
Reindeer noir also spans books and the stage.
Anu Ojala, a writer and lawyer based in Rovaniemi, is working on her third crime novel set in Lapland. A play by Heidi Holmavuo, a crime writer, about the true story of a 1950s murder case in the Lapland town of Kemi premiered in November. Her book on the case, Unsolved – The Case of Elli Immo, which she co-wrote with Elina Backman, led to police reopening the investigation.
Backman’s book Before the Polar Night Falls (Ennen kuin tulee pimeää), part of her international bestselling crime fiction series, is about a woman who tries to solve the mystery of her sister’s death in a swamp in a village in northern Lapland.
Jussi Laaksonen, the marketing director of PR firm House of Lapland, said the area was “a mental state of being” as well as a geographical region.
Reindeer noir, he said, “has a lot to do with that unexplainable thing that Lapland has. It’s something inbetween.”
Laaksonen said he believed that Rovaniemi, which was rebuilt by the architect Alvar Aalto after it was burned to the ground by the retreating German army in the second world war and features a reindeer head embedded in its street plan, offered something “very raw”.
The region’s unique quality lay in something intangible, he added. “It has a lot to do with the attitude and the atmosphere that the people make, that the landscape makes, that all the infrastructure makes, and it kind of makes you think in a certain quirky weird way.”
