One can only imagine when the Finnish Film Academy submitted Concrete Night as the country’s official submission for the Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 2014, that the Finnish Tourist Authorities must have had a royal fit. This deeply disturbing story is shot in a bleak unforgiving depressing public housing project in one of Helsinki’s rougher areas that is enough to put anyone from ever thinking of stepping foot into the country. 

The story is of Simo (Johannes Brotherus) a 14 year old rather confused lad who has a real affinity for doom and despondency. The movie starts with a  dream sequence in which he imagines himself trapped in a train underwater and is desperately looking for a way out : it turn out to be an unsubtle allegory of his life to come.  

Simo lives with his manipulative alcoholic mother and Illka (Jari Virman) his troubled big brother who is enjoying his last night of freedom before he starts a prison sentence the next morning.  The siblings decide to spend the evening together and this involves encounters with druggies, street thugs, Illka’s masochistic girlfriend, and finally when Simo is alone, with a gay predator who lives in a neighboring building.

The brutal and very graphic violence inflicted by Simo in one of the nastiest gay-bashings we have witnessed for a long time, is one of many unsettling aspects on this very dreary scenario which frankly is too pretentious by half. It’s not the misguided depravity which is the most offensive part of the movie, but more the filmmaker’s (Pirjo Honkasalo) tendency to try and raise the tenor of this dispiriting plot with trotting out some rather annoying emperical  nonsense.

The one redeeming factor of the whole movie was the stunning and stark black and white cinematography of the darkly-lit bleak Helsinki landscape, but that alone is not enough to raise your spirits after a very disquieting 96 minutes.