Rent The White Reindeer (1952)

Myths of desire and ice - The White Reindeer review by CP Customer

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.

Snow, Spells, and a Woman Cornered - The White Reindeer review by griggs

It’s rare to find a folk-horror that feels half natural-history documentary, half fairy tale, and still keeps you leaning in. The snowy Lapland landscapes aren’t just scenic; they set the film’s mood — beautiful, indifferent, quietly menacing. The soundtrack helps enormously: spare and insistent, it keeps unease ticking under even the calmest images.

What struck me most is how firmly it sticks with a woman’s experience, especially for 1952. Mirjami Kuosmanen plays Pirita with a controlled, straight-backed intensity that makes the supernatural turn feel less like a twist and more like an extension of her loneliness. This isn’t jump-scare horror; it’s desire and judgement closing in.

From a modern angle, there’s an uncomfortable caveat: it draws heavily on Sámi mythology, but it isn’t an indigenous point of view. Even so, it’s eerie, elegant, and sharper than it first appears.