Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Horns, Hostages, and Human Trafficking Santa – Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we go full Finland and unwrap a Christmas movie that answers the question nobody asked: what if Santa Claus wasn’t a jolly gift-giver, but an ancient, horned, child-snatching nightmare buried under a mountain?

Our main feature is Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (dir. Jalmari Helander), a wintery sci-fi/horror-dark-comedy that feels like The Thing wandered into a folk tale, got frostbite, and decided to start a black-market Santa operation.

The setup is instantly great: a US drilling team blasts into the Korvatunturi mountain and hits something that absolutely should not be thawed. Nearby, reindeer herders start finding their animals slaughtered, children begin disappearing, and weird petty theft spreads through the village — radios, hairdryers, potato sacks… all vanishing like some grim Advent calendar of doom.

At the centre is young Pietari, a kid who’s convinced Santa is real… and that Santa is coming to punish him. While the adults argue about Russians, borders and compensation invoices, Pietari is reading ancient texts about a pagan “Santa” with horns, and building literal Home Alone-style defences because he thinks he’s next.

Then things get properly deranged: a naked, feral old man is caught in a wolf trap baited with a pig’s head — and the locals start to suspect they’ve found Santa. Turns out they’ve found one of his helpers… and the rules are simple: no swearing, no aggression, no “bad behaviour”, because these elves replicate and escalate like gremlins with hypothermia. Suddenly it’s old, nude men everywhere, and the film leans into it with alarming confidence.

The finale goes full Goonies-in-a-blizzard: helicopters, a reindeer pen used as a trap, kids in sacks as bait, dynamite in the ice, and a plan so insane it only works because everyone is too cold to argue.

And then the ending swerves again — from folk-horror survival to capitalism speedrun — as the village realises the “elves” are worth money, hoses them down, trains them up, and ships them around the world as mall Santas in crates like festive livestock. It’s bizarre, dark, and very funny in a “wait… did they really just do that?” way.

It’s not cosy. It’s not sweet. It is snowy, grim, inventive, and weirdly brilliant — with proper atmosphere, real faces, and a premise it commits to without winking at you.

Strong recommend.

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