Heavy Trip (2018)

Orginal title: Hevi reissu

Friends Turo (Johannes Holopainen), Jynkky (Antti Heikkinen), Pasi (Max Ovaska) and Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio) live in a small Finnish village whose only claim to fame seems to be reindeer farming (ranching?). The only thing that’s breaking up the boredom is the guys’ shared love for metal. They’ve been a practicing death metal act for a good twelve years now, as a matter of fact. You need to take that practicing part literally, by the way, for the band has never had a gig, does not have a single self-written song in their repertoire, goes without a name, and has only ever played in the basement of the farm of Lotvonen’s parents. But things start to change: dreaming of fame, fortune, and the heart of local flower shop gal Miia (Minka Kuustonen) motivates Turo to really get serious about the whole being a band thing. Why, they even manage write their first own song.

Things become intense when a guy (Rune Temte) running a Norwegian metal festival comes to the farm to buy reindeer blood, as you do. After accidentally dousing him in blood, they give him their demo tape. Clearly, they are a shoe-in for the festival! Once Turo uses the fantasy gig to show off to Miia, the whole village that formerly treated them as shitty dudes with too long hair is cheering them on. So it is rather unfortunate there’s actually no space for them at the festival. But as you know, crazy dreams can come true in the world of metal. Insert devil horns here.

What you really don’t expect going into a film about a Finnish backwoods death metal band is to encounter something as sweet and heart-warming as this one turns out to be. Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren’s movie really doesn’t have a nasty bone in its body, treating characters like its protagonists whom most films would play as sad sacks to laugh about as incredibly nice, if perfectly weird, young men you can’t help but root for in any crisis. Even Turo’s nemesis, the sleazy lounge singer and used car salesman Jouni Tulkku (Ville Tiihonen) is only treated with mild derision, a reaction that actually fits his character’s failings more than going to extremes.

While this is a film about music very often all about burning the world down and dancing in the ruins, it does understand that it, as well as the music is champions, is also about the joy of playacting, of using a pose to become larger-than-life to play music that’s larger than life, too. So our protagonists are, at heart, just really nice guys who want to finally fulfil their dreams and a have a bit of an adventure in the process instead of mythic rock gods. And while all this obviously leads to funny situations for the characters, the film never makes fun of their dreams or their having dreams, presenting itself as a nice antidote to the South Park and Deadpool schools of humour whose makers hate dreams, hopes, and their characters too much to ever make a joke I’d find funny.

And funny Heavy Trip is basically non-stop, with good enough comical timing that even projectile vomiting becomes pretty hilarious. Among other highlights are Pasi’s black metal face paint, which makes him look like the sad clown of metal, the scene where Jouni sells the gang a horrible van by dressing it up as The Van of Death with many murders and accidents connected to it, Turo’s, ahem, encounter with his spirit animal (who, we can assume, is the best at what it does, but what it does isn’t very nice), the acquisition of a replacement drummer by kidnapping of a black Laplander (Chike Ohanwe) from the mental institution where Turo works as a particularly nice nurse (it’s funnier than it sounds, really), and so on and so forth.


It’s a brilliant movie, the sort of comedy you go out of not just having laughed parts of your anatomy off (which is pretty metal, right?), but also with a big smile of actual joy.