Crime and Punishment

Rodion Raskolnikov, a young man from Helsinki, has lost his faith in society. His father has just died and Rodion believes that his father’s landlady, who has been greedy enough to keep raising the rent and to top it all, selling him booze, is to blame for his death. Who would be the Napoleon who’d put an end to all this injustice, he asks his brother Ragnar. That Napoleon is revealed to be himself when Rodion takes up his father’s gun and murders the landlady and her daughter, who unluckily happened to be present, in cold blood. The shadow of the frantic violence follows Rodion relentlessly, and he is soon chased by the police, the creepy ex-lover of the woman he met and, worst of all, the horror of his own thoughts and guilt.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s hit novel Crime and Punishment has already been filmed at least 30 times, but never like this! The modernised classic is set in Swedish-speaking Helsinki, where the soundscape and cinematography reveal the very darkest side of the summery city. The cold clinicality of the dialogue conveys a classic Russian melancholy as Rodion experiences the real punishment for his crime: unrelenting anguish and a deep-seated guilt.

Jaakko Jokinen (translated by Moritz Müller)