Rent The White Reindeer (1952)

Myths of desire and ice - The White Reindeer review by TE

This is a wonderful artefact from the rich treasury of Scandinavian folkloric films about witches.

It is also a stark example of the films and literature that express sexual anxiety via transformation into animals.

It is an intense, hard-boiled narrative told with frame after frame of beautiful wintery landscapes. It is also a classically misogynistic tale about the dangers of female desire.

The director presents an unvarnished story, leaving us to make the leap towards a rejection of irrational superstition.

Private Rites of Magic - The White Reindeer review by CH

“Altogether elsewhere, vast / Herds of reindeer move across / Miles and miles of golden moss, / Silently and very fast.” The concluding stanza of Auden's 1947 poem “The Fall of Rome” - an allegory about the nature of society – comes to mind when watching The White Reindeer (1952).

It was written by director Eric Blomberg with his wife Mirjami Kuosmanen who also stars in it (and died too young a decade later). She plays a newly-married woman whose husband is so often away that she prevails upon a shaman in their remote, snowy homestead to bring him back. He does so but the catch is that the process brings out this beautiful woman's latent witch: now and again she will turn into the eponymous creature who leaps from the herd which swirls across the landscape. None of the human tribe is safe from her predations.

That is the sum of it, and, put like this, it might sound the stuff of nordic Hammer. This is to reckon without Blomberg's wonderful filming of that land, and, being almost silent, the hypnotic score which evokes the wind and the ever-moving animals of a Lapland briefly visited by the sun. As with the places to which Auden alludes, the film is a meditation upon the fragility of society. What will survive of us is reindeer.

Beware the were-deer! - The White Reindeer review by HW

You’ll never see a film quite like this. A Nordic horror set in snowy Lapland, where the wife of a reindeer herder misses her husband so much that she makes a deal with a crazy old shaman. Not only does she become irresistible but she can transform into a white reindeer and lure hunters away. When alone with them in Evil Valley, the woman turns human again but with vampire teeth and, though we’re not shown it, we assume she feasts on the men! So arguably this is a feminist horror, with a witch using her desirous beauty both as a woman and a deer to prey on unsuspecting men, while at home she keeps up appearances as a good wife. At 68 minutes, however, this is not a deep psychodrama. Enjoy this as a visual, creepy fairy tale, with astounding frozen scenery, an unearthly score and a dread atmosphere. Utterly unique and compelling.