This was an interesting film for me mainly for two reasons. First, I was curious about the practicalities of how white people live in the harsh climatic conditions of the far North. Second, like many people I think, I am fascinated by large predatory wild animals.
In relation to the first point, I am not sure that what I took from the film was what was meant to be taken from it. There is a somewhat stereotypical view of Nordic countries (I am including Finland, where this film is set, amongst these) as more egalitarian and therefore more civilised and pleasant to live in than most other countries. However, I did not find the characters and society portrayed in this film as any more pleasant and sympathetic than people in any other country, including my own.
For instance, the purportedly most benign character, the foster mother, seemed to me to be rather cruel in some ways, as for instance in her behaviour towards Laila, the supposedly mentally ill or "troubled" birth mother of her adopted daughter, Salla, the main character of the film. The persecution of Laila by the children of the locality is unfortunately typical of the behaviour of people generally towards outsiders. I did not find even Salla to be as sympathetic a character in some ways as I think she was meant to be. But then, she is after all a teenage member of our species. And needless to say, the villain of the piece, a reindeer rustler and wolf killer, is suitably nasty.
The unpleasantness of the society and characters depicted in the film extended for me to the relationship between them and the natural environment. While one can understand the usefulness of guns, snowmobiles, four wheel drive vehicles, quads etc in the far North, the culture (ie our modern industrialised culture) represented by all that paraphernalia contrasts unfavourably in some ways with the culture of the indigenous nomadic people who had a more symbiotic and less destructive relationship with the natural environment.
It should be noted that the "wolves" in the film are not real wolves but wolfdogs, which are hybrids resulting from the mating of wolves with dogs. That was somewhat disappointing but probably necessary given the difficulty of getting wolves to avoid the furniture.
However, I would still recommend this film. It is well made and well acted and it is an accurate - if not indeed all too accurate - portrayal of human society in microcosm against the backdrop of a harshly beautiful natural landscape.
