Nox

“Human is a sentient animal,” says a scruffy laborer, forced back home by severe pain in his legs, to his friend, whose glue-blurred hallucinations turn the walls into pixels. Then the comedy between the two friends shatters into the most bizarre tale of revenge, in which even Donald Duck gets a say.

In Matti Harju’s (Natura, R&A 2023) newest film Nox, which builds its own merciless, idiosyncratic world on the margins of mainstream Finnish cinema, the periphery lies above all inside the mind. And it’s really rumbling in there. The men of the backwoods talk about this and that, but these sentient animals seem to have no language for their own feelings. With no script or professional actors, improvisation and chance lead the way towards a unique kind of audiovisual truth, where the viewer isn’t let off easy. A strangely lush grove tastes poisonous on the tongue, and the ordinary gas station looms to mythical proportions amid the soft patter of summer rain.

In Nox, the brightness of the morning sun pierces the landscape just as mercilessly as the drug-fuelled shadows of the night before. Perhaps the walls really are turning into pixels. Then a photograph of a man with a familiar face is found in the car’s glove compartment. Why it is there, no one knows. By then, the rain has become a storm.

Elias Jurvanen