Finland’s Night Visions has screened Love Is the Monster [+lee también:
entrevista: Alex Noyer
ficha de la película] by Alex Noyer, which shows how couples on the brink of a breakup gather in a strange retreat, turning to healer Tiina (Milla Puolakanaho) for help. The Paris-born director tells us more.

Cineuropa: Did you want to poke fun at the whole wellness craze? The film brings to mind Nine Perfect Strangers, with Milla Puolakanaho channelling her inner Nicole Kidman in a wig.
Alex Noyer: I wanted to find a connective tissue between Finnish mythological lore and a contemporary international audience. I know how folks are around LA, and the idea of mythology-inspired wellness felt like a great way to motivate the gathering. I could absolutely imagine people being sold on this pagan methodology.

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That made me laugh, and I felt it could be our comedic twist. I did a deep dive: I watched a couple of episodes of the Goop show on Netflix and listened to Gwyneth Paltrow explain why the techniques she was describing were valid. I watched the pilot of Nine Perfect Strangers and could see a certain like-mindedness between Milla’s and Nicole’s characters, and then The White Lotus came up in a conversation with my lawyer’s brother. I opted for a denouement more akin to George A Romero’s The Crazies, but I had great fun building a context that combined those inspirations.

And you reference some Finnish clichés, too – sauna, sahti and silent men.
I mean, isn’t my film the best ad to come and visit Finland? The sauna was a necessity, as was the man who speaks very little. I asked my Finnish actors not to correct their accents, and our comfort with nudity – in contrast with our interpersonal reputation – is something I wanted to have. I love bringing guests to Finland and seeing their faces when they walk into a steaming-hot sauna where everyone is naked. Hopefully, my fellow Finns will feel good about what we did there.

My mother is Finnish and my dad was French. I spent all my summers in Finland, which obviously influenced my desire to film a Finnish summer movie in the perpetual daylight. After Conductor and Sound of Violence [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Alex Noyer
ficha de la película], I needed to see how I could bring my roots into a project. I started by revisiting our national book of poetry: the Kalevala. I found the imperfections of the characters and our take on a divine being or demon of love, where love is an energy, rather than a feeling, so fascinating. Still, as an expat Finn, I felt I should make it a contemporary, international story.

You shot in Canada in the end. Is it too hard or too expensive to film in Finland?
We were planning to shoot in Finland, but the budget was getting too high. Canadian producer Laurence Gendron convinced me to consider Ontario. It’s uncanny how much it resembles Finland. The biggest challenge was finding a location that looked like a Finnish home. Another was crickets – we don’t have them in Finland, but they are loud in Ontario. Finally, we also had to build a sauna, and I’m sure Laurence still has nightmares about it.

A few years ago, people rediscovered folk horror. Are you referencing or playing with any particular myths here? It seems so, starting with the demon Lempo.
I love folk horror and movies like The Wicker Man. Folk horror is great at uncovering pagan lore from different cultures and recontextualising it through cinema. I was tapping into a culture I know, but I still felt enthralled by what I’d discovered. Not much has been written about Lempo beyond the mentions in the Kalevala. Due to my long fascination with Greek and Roman mythology, I felt Lempo should be a goddess – and the perfect villain. Love makes us do crazy things, so a retreat haunted by Lempo could only crank the problems of these couples up to 11.

They just can’t communicate. There’s a lot of loneliness in the story.
Their friends probably wish they would split up because it’s clearly unhealthy. I wanted to look at toxicity and the instinct of these people to stay together, and see how I could throw a match into a tank of petrol. “Honesty and understanding are how we’re going to fix this,” Justin says, and it is this promise that lured those couples in. Their inability to be honest about the state of their relationship is a recipe for disaster.

It was important to bring in Blair Bathory and Hannu Aukia to participate in the development of the story. I have been happily married for 17 years and couldn’t really use my own experience. They brought other points of view and so did the cast – Madeline Zima mentioned the topic of toxic relationships as a theme that attracted her to the project.

I remember Sound of Violence very well, but here, you seem more interested in grown-up problems: infidelity, boredom, lack of sexual spark. What are you trying to explore these days?
You’re exactly right. I wanted to make a horror for grown-ups. Younger audiences will connect with the characters as cautionary tales, but people who have gone through the rollercoaster of their love life will feel familiarity. As a 45-year-old filmmaker, I was keen to speak to my fellow Gen X-ers and older millennials. I like to “hack” horror tropes and challenge their traditional structures, and both horror and non-horror folks have found plenty to relate to here.

Horror is the field of mad scientists, but it’s also a genre made for exploration, critique and commentary. I certainly didn’t hold back with Conductor or Sound of Violence, and while the “dramedy” first impression of this film may deceive you, it gets crazy very fast. That is what genre films have the freedom to do.