ANOTHER DAY TO LIVE THROUGH *** UK 2023 Dir: Peter Simmons. 81 mins
Nordic Noir is huge in fiction and in film with the original and remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The icy landscape, the bleak buildings, the shadowy people with a lot going on behind the eyeballs that sometimes stay in their sockets. Not set in snow and ice Another Day To Live Through (2023) preaches a closed world of dysfunctional people with a lot going on who are trapped in a nightmarish isolation.
The film opens with a naked bloodied woman Satu (Lene Kqiku) slowly walking into a lake, with a title on the screen saying, “Day 10”. Cut to a lovely log cabin with Satu waking up in a bed that she doesn’t know. The camera follows her around as she stops to count matryoshka dolls on the mantel then kneels before a mirror saying “Hello”. The picture then switches to Day 1 using a Film Noir trope of showing the audience how the film people got to a certain point.
In the living room area is a television that continually plays or seems to be the brilliant Vincent Price version of The Last Man On Earth (1964). The audience hears dialogue regarding Price’s character capturing a dog, that he will tend and ‘have good times together’. The audience also hears and sometimes sees images when Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) finds Franca (Ruth Collins) whom he almost imprisons again of desperate loneliness. Film within a film is confusing in any case yet these sound moments underscore what is happening with Satu and the male Lauri (Timo Torikka) who lives in the cabin and tends to her. Satu has trouble recognizing faces as she suffers from prosopagnosia, as a result of the gunshot wound to the head. This affliction leads to the death of a Russian man whom she meets while hiking.
Lauri puts Satu to sleep and goes through her belongings. He later reads her letters and has an entire conversation with her as she sleeps, taking the liberty of saying her part of the conversation out loud. He experiences her letters vicariously. Satu does not go anywhere, to a town or other cabins as it becomes slowly evident that Lauri has his quarry, the power, and the control. In the most gripping scene, Lauri is a pitiable character, as he is someone so lonely that he needs the company of his victims similar to Morgan in The Last Man On Earth (1964). The film becomes a battle of wits between the two in an idyllic isolated environment of the cabin.
Every day between the characters bleeds into each other, indistinguishable exploiting the horror redundancy in life. The trees, the lake, the stillness, the sunlight on the fields, and the sound of birds all are lost as they become a soundtrack for emptiness and non-existent again like the Price film playing in the background.
This film works on a subtle level of creeping horror with both Lene Kqiku and Timo Torikka giving subtle startling performances with shock, bewilderment, and dialogue to bring a sense of oppression. Some interesting facial juxtapositions between Lauri and a younger man Niska (Vincent Willestrand) who pays a price leading one to wonder what it is that Satu sees. Who is real and who is not as she desperately clings to reality by sticking to a routine each morning. The memory in Satu is illustrated with some startling no-face makeup.
Jarring yes in effect also puts the audience on edge much the same as Bernard Herrmann’s screeching violins in his score for Psycho (1960) is a continual switching between Finnish and English.
Another Day To Live Through (2023) works slowly and effectively on the mind much like a slow hallucinogenic. The actors all so well being understated, in performance coupled with the natural yet creepy sounds of the world of isolation. The sense of doom is there as these are characters caught on the treadmill to private oblivion or in Noir parlance ‘An express train to nowhere fast’. One of the best lines from Satu sums it up “I’m not sick Bob, I’ll make your breakfast.”
Review by Terry Sherwood
ANOTHER DAY TO LIVE THROUGH is available to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video in the UK
ANOTHER DAY TO LIVE THROUGH is also on Blu-ray and DVD in the USA as well as available to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video