The White Reindeer: A Haunting Fairytale Experience

The White Reindeer: A tale whispered only to you.

Introduction by Jim Mcleod

As winter descends and blankets the landscape in a tranquil yet chilling embrace, Erik Blomberg’s 1952 cinematic masterpiece The White Reindeer comes alive, pulling us into a haunting fable filled with both beauty and darkness. This film, awarded Best Fairytale Film at the Cannes Film Festival, presents a poignant narrative that intertwines themes of desire, fate, and the harrowing consequences of our choices. Set against the breathtaking backdrop of Finland’s frozen fells, The White Reindeer invites viewers to witness the enchanting yet tragic journey of Pirita, a woman whose longing for love leads her down a perilous path, ultimately questioning the very nature of morality and destiny. Join us as we delve into this extraordinary film and uncover the depths of its artistry and the profound truths it reveals about the human condition.

As winter blankets the landscape in its serene yet stark beauty, the cinematic classic The White Reindeer, directed by Erik Blomberg, emerges as a timeless tale woven with magic and malevolence. Awarded the title of Best Fairytale Film at the Cannes Film Festival, this 1952 masterpiece invites viewers on a poignant journey through the frozen fells of Finland, a realm where folklore intertwines with stark reality. Here, we encounter Pirita, a woman whose thirst for love leads her down a harrowing path, showcasing themes of desire, fate, and the consequences of one’s choices.

In this reflective essay, we delve into the dichotomy of Pirita’s enchanting story—one that captures both the supernatural allure of fairy tales and the unyielding brutality that life can sometimes impose. Drawing parallels with modern narratives, we examine how The White Reindeer challenges the viewer’s understanding of morality and destiny, leaving us to ponder: In a world ruled by fate, can we escape the consequences of our deepest desires? Join us as we peel back the layers of this extraordinary film, uncovering the depths of its artistry and the chilling truths it reveals about the human experience.

The White Reindeer: A tale whispered only to you.

A Review by Kit Whitfield

Welcome to the last essay before Christmas! (And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, happy holidays.) 

Are you a fan of Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015)? I love it, and one of the many reasons is that the movie itself is a character. By captioning itself ‘A New England folk tale,’ it tells us something intriguing: we may get to watch it as a twenty-first century audience – but it’s not a twenty-first century tale. It’s the kind of tale about Puritan America that Puritan Americans, had they had access to a movie camera, might have told about themselves. 

It’s a fascinating trick that puts a kind of shadow self in the audience with us. There’s our normal self, the modern viewer, knowing what a movie is and judging the characters by the standards of our own day – but there’s someone else as well. There’s the person the folk tale is speaking to: an older, more paranoid, less merciful self who might agree without question that yes, witches eat babies, the woods are haunted, and girls who talk back to their mothers meet bad ends. A self afraid of what’s out there in the wilds. 

We have to engage that self for the movie to make sense; if we don’t, the plot feels strange and disconnected. But if we do, we get something richer and fiercer than most movies ever attempt. We are the modern viewer aware of the device; we are the Puritan settler listening in fear to patriarch William’s warning: ‘Tis God alone, not man, what knows who is a son of Abraham and who is not. Who is good and who is evil.’ 

And if we can do that, it’s like those old 3D glasses that show you a different image in each eye. Overlay the two, and new dimensions leap to life. 

It’s a difficult trick to pull off, and The Witch is a rare treat for managing it so well. But it’s not unique. Venture into the frozen snows of winter with me, and I’ll tell you about an OG. 

Who’s up for a fairytale? 

When I call The White Reindeer a fairytale, that comes with a cinematic certificate of authenticity. A jury at Cannes literally awarded The White Reindeer Best Fairytale Film in 1953, and the head of that jury was none other than the legendary Jean Cocteau, who thirteen years before had begun his famous and endlessly-copied La Belle et La Bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946) with a plea to his audience to enter the cinema in a state of childlike openness to belief. 

La Belle et La Bête is great, don’t get me wrong. But if I’m going to watch a fairytale it’s White Reindeer all the way, and to explain why, let me say to you three magic words, the veritable lament of childhood:

It’s not fair. 

If ‘Once upon a time’ is the door that opens childhood onto magic, ‘It’s not fair’ is the door that we spend childhood banging upon. We want the world to be fair, but as the grown-ups keep telling us, it’s not. And they can’t tell us why. It’s too complicated. All they can really tell us is that the world is bigger than we are. So much bigger, in fact, that from our little vantage point the world is ruled less by chance or logic than by mythic absolutes.

The White Reindeer is a snow queen of a movie: beautiful and enchanting and very cruel.

 And it really doesn’t seem fair. 

Listen:

Once upon a time a woman was lost in the snow. She was in labour, and when she staggered up to a tent and begged for help, of course the good people took her in. They couldn’t save her: she died in childbirth. But they kindly adopted and loved as their own the little girl she bore. They called her Pirita. 

That’s where the story begins. The camera sweeps slow across the Finnish landscape, mile after mile of frozen, beautiful emptiness, and a woman’s voice shudders across the soundtrack with a song of warning:

Little girl, child of Lapland

Born in a snowdrift

Grew to girlhood, straw-stuffed shoes

Like a reindeer doe.

She did not know as a child

Nor when she was married

That she was born a witch

Evil in her belly.

Pirita is doomed before she’s born. She didn’t have to do anything wrong. She will do wrong before the movie ends, believe me, but where we begin is important: evil isn’t something she chooses so much as something she’s fated to. 

And it’s not the fate we want for her. When we first meet Pirita we see a beautiful young woman – and we know Blomberg thought so, because the actress, Mirjami Kuosmanen, was his co-writer on the film and also his wife. More than beautiful, though, she’s simply adorable. 

Pirita is merry, playful, guileless. She wins a reindeer sleigh race and happily marries Aslak, the herder who catches up with her. As they tumble through the snowy hills together, you’d think there was nothing in their future but love and happiness.

Pirita thinks so too. But she has a hard time accepting any moment without joy.

Pirita beams like the sun when Aslak is there; she’s all hugs and smiles and delight. But he can’t be there all the time; he’s a reindeer herder, and that means going away for weeks together. For Pirita anything that takes Aslak away is unbearable; if he so much as sleeps with his back to her she goes and stirs the fire to wake him up for a cuddle. 

But honeymoons have to end, and so he goes off. He leaves her a gift, a little white reindeer fawn to keep as a pet. 

It’s worth noting that while Blomberg and Kuosmanen were Finnish, the characters here are ‘Lapp’ – which is to say Saami. I am no expert on Saami folklore and its relationship to twentieth-century Finland (which means I’m ill placed to judge how respectful a presentation of Saami faith and culture the movie is), but from what I can gather, in Saami tradition a white reindeer is sacred. Saami cosmology sees spirits in all animals, but a white reindeer is special, a visitor from the spirit world that brings luck and prosperity. Giving one to Pirita is more than just giving her a cute creature. It’s more like entrusting her with something holy, a living talisman that a virtuous woman would prize and protect. 

(There’s some interesting stuff on the subject here: https://littlewomen.medium.com/reindeer-in-the-saami-mythology-aeac8116140d) 

A good wife – especially by folkloric standards – would accept what she’s given, bow to her husband’s duty, and wait patiently. 

Pirita doesn’t. She heads off to the local wizard, Tsalkku-Nilla. 

For a payment of food and drink – especially the alcohol – he’s prepared to give her a love potion. ‘You women, young and old the same,’ he cackles. When a husband goes off to the fells, wanting to enchant him back . . . well, Pirita’s not the first to have the idea. And Tsalkku-Nilla could do it. He can make her irresistible to every reindeer-herder out there. 

But what he proposes is one of those dreadful bargains that crops up in a lot of folklore: she must sacrifice the first living creature she meets on her way home. 

Even if you’ve no connection to Finland that may strike a chill, because it’s one of those tales rattling around the collective unconscious. It crops up all over. 

It can go well as long as it’s part of a trickster tale: there’s another variant where the Devil demands the first living thing that crosses a bridge, and the hero contrives for it to be an animal rather than a person. That’s a popular one; you can read a lot of variants on it here: https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type1191.html 

But it’s a bargain that favours the one setting it. The one who accepts always come off worst. 

What Pirita gets is more like the version that nobbled Cretan general Idomeneus: caught in a storm he offered the gods the first living thing he saw on land if they calmed the seas, and of course the first thing he saw was his son. It’s one of those bargains bred into our marrow that most of us – if we weren’t truly desperate – would know better than to fool with.

Pirita doesn’t hesitate. She watches with such rapacity that the divining-stone starts to dance on the drum all by itself, and Tsalkku-Nilla, who was pretty confident doing his spooky act up till then, stares at her in horror and cries, ‘Witch!’

See what I mean about the elegant unfairness? The White Reindeer doesn’t mess around. At this point Pirita is trying to get a spell – but she’s not trying to cast one; she doesn’t know how. She went to the wizard, and he worked up something that’s obviously bread-and-butter magic to him. It’s not that big a transgression so far. 

But the hunger with which she watches him . . . something about that sends the divining stone askew.

It’s not so much what Pirita does as how she feels that makes her a witch. 

Not even what she wants; every wife wants her husband back from the hills. Tsalkku-Nilla says as much himself. But Pirita wants it with a rapacity that frightens the magic man. It’s as if strong emotion unlocks something within her that she didn’t know was there. 

Well, Pirita goes home, and to her excitement, Aslak has come back to see her. He’s holding her beautiful white reindeer – and when he releases it, it runs to her. That’s the first living thing she meets: the white reindeer.

So she sacrifices it. 

Now, if you go in unfamiliar with the mythology that’s already bad enough: it’s the gift of her husband, her pet, a special little beastie. But it helps to understand that what she’s plunging her knife into is something between an animal and an angel. All for the company of a husband who would have been back if she’d waited a few weeks anyway. 

A lot rests on Kuosmanen’s performance. She has a face that doesn’t quit. This is the story of a witch, and to make it a simple tale of a wrongdoer who eventually got what was coming to her, Blomberg could have cast a duller actress to play Pirita full of heedless selfishness. It would fit the narrative. 

But it wouldn’t be as interesting as what we get. Kuosmanen instead illumines Pirita with a kind of helpless ravening. She’s appalled at what she’s doing – but she acts as if already fated, as if the idea of rejecting the bargain was simply unthinkable. It’s less as if she’s making decisions than as if the decisions possess her. 

She is a vessel for herself.

In the realms of hungry myth, evil is something you might just be fated to whether you want it or not. That’s one way to scare your audience: none of us think we’re evil – but neither did Pirita. The idea that we might be doomed because of forces completely beyond our ken is a fearsome one. 

So Pirita sacrifices a sacred creature. And she gets what she wants. No reindeer herder – not just Aslak, but no other man – can resist her. 

But there’s something that lures reindeer herders other than a beautiful woman. 

Now when Pirita leaves her tent at night, she leaves in the form of a white reindeer. You don’t herd or hunt a white reindeer; you capture it. You go after it even if you have to go alone.

There are Saami legends about this, but let’s also remember this film was made in 1952, eleven years after George Waggener’s The Wolf Man and twenty-one years after Bela Lugosi’s turn as Dracula. It should feel like a familiar genre. Cinematically we’re looking at a werewolf movie: a likeable character falls prey to a curse that turns them into an animal and they do things they would never have wished to, a tale that can only end with their tragic, inevitable destruction. We know this story. 

Yet watching Pirita doesn’t feel that way at all: it feels like we’re fully in the realms of the mythic. You have to step back and remember what else was being made in its era – because by the time she makes her leap from the tent and lands on her hooves, it’ll have become a very faint echo in your mind. It doesn’t feel like a werewolf or a vampire flick, though it would be extremely difficult to argue that it 100% isn’t.  

It feels more like we’re listening to a story told by a member of Pirita’s culture that somehow magically appeared on a movie screen.

Other movies don’t seem to exist in this world. There’s just folk belief and the snow. Somehow it’s hard to feel that the film was made at all; it watches like it manifested out of the snowy fells. 

And it manifests horror from here on. As a white reindeer, Pirita lures men to follow her. But it’s as a woman – a kind of succubus looking almost shocked at her own bloodlust – that she kills them. 

It’s a beautiful film, and from this point we sink into pure Expressionist terror. Pirita no longer has any control over herself; she’s possessed by her own witchery. Bullets won’t kill her; nothing but cold iron will free the community from the monster now ravaging it. 

By the end, Pirita herself is horrified by what she’s become. She tries to take it back. But there’s no mercy for her. She was born a witch, and she sacrificed a sacred creature, and then she lived a witch. 

It doesn’t even feel like Pirita’s being punished. She just lives in a world where there are no take-backs. She repents, but repentance doesn’t get her anywhere because why would it? What’s done is done. She made the sacrifice; she got the spell. That’s that. Asking for things to be different is like asking a storm not to freeze you. 

You made your choice. Now die in it.

It’s brutal and frightening and it casts an implacable spell. And it’s so unlike the stories we’re used to nowadays that it catches you completely off-guard. 

We live in an era of redeemable villains. 

Even as I write, cinemas are screening Wicked, the all-singing, all-dancing tale of how this jerk on a stick is actually a sympathetic character if only you know what it was like from her point of view. 

In The White Reindeer we do see things from Pirita’s point of view. She wants her husband home and she doesn’t want to be reasonable about it. As a tale of patriarchal warning it works well enough: accept your lot, my girl, or look where you’ll end up. 

But it doesn’t watch that way: it’s too much Pirita’s film. We follow along with her every feeling, and we cringe as she makes her mistake, and we wish and wish she could somehow be saved.

But that’s not happening. It feels cruel – but all the more powerful for its cruelty.

Moral judgement can be fun, let’s be honest; that’s one of the discreditable secrets of mankind. We’re punitive little bastards if we’re allowed to be. Many of the most memorable characters in fiction are those who we love to hate. 

But do we always love to hate people? Not if it feels like they didn’t get a chance. As we leave childhood behind we start to feel that things aren’t always black and white, that just calling someone ‘bad’ might be missing something. Maybe the real bad guy is the one throwing labels around. 

When we start wanting to defy gravity, calling someone wicked feels like a burden we need to shed. And you know, that’s basically a good impulse. It’s an act of moral development. 

But artistically it’s doesn’t have to be the end point. In a way it’s the adolescence of fiction – and I don’t say that as an insult, I like teenagers and I like YA stuff. But it’s a fairly simple trick; heck, I still remember getting good marks in primary school for writing a story about a poor old dragon being harassed by ‘a so-called “brave” prince.’ 

In life, yes, we need to remember that no one is simple. 

But in art, sometimes black-and-white isn’t simplistic, but primal.

Those first-order stories exist for a reason. They strike deep notes on our heartstrings. The moral order they present is so rule-bound that it becomes its own kind of wildness: the uncaring, primordial wildness of a natural phenomenon.

Is it fair? That’s the wrong question. It isn’t fair or unfair; it just is.

Now to be clear: primal is not the same as primitive. 

We’re talking about a modern work of art, and to strike primal feelings takes sophistication. Remember that Jean Cocteau awarded it a prize, and he was head of that jury because of the glittering unreality of La Belle et La Bête, a film positively cluttered with ornate contrivances. Primal feelings are something that often interests highly cultivated artists, and that’s what we’re looking at here. 

The fact that The White Reindeer feels like you’re watching an ancient fable rendered naively on the screen is the product of tremendous artifice. It’s an extraordinary achievement; it didn’t just win at Cannes but also the 1956 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. 

The modern world loved this film, and rightly so. I cannot express how hard it was not to screencap every single frame for this essay. Einar Englund’s score wails and swells throughout, symphonic and ever-present. Everything serves its relentless end and nothing is wasted. 

Yet even knowing all this, I still find it hard to believe that anyone but me ever saw it. My intellect knows it was famous and awarded, but my imagination absorbed it like something my godmother told me in a kitchen corner. I suspect the Cannes and Golden Globe juries felt the same thing. 

This movie was whispered to you and only to you. Every one of you. 

It’s a film that feels as if it exists outside time and art – and time and art went into making it feel that way. 

(And while we’re at it, let’s not patronise its inspirations. It may be based on a folk tale – a pre-Christian one at that, inspired by both Finnish and Saami mythology – but pre-Christian Finns and Saami people weren’t stupid, and telling a stark tale demands a strong imagination. ‘Easy reading is damn hard writing,’ as Nathaniel Hawthorne famously put it.)

Stories like this are a kind of high-wire act, suspended over human instincts it’s easy to tumble into. It’s hard to care for a character and watch her possessed by her dark fate. Humans may herd reindeer, but we’re also self-domesticating animals: to care is our natural state. If we didn’t have compassion for each other we’d never have been able to establish communities anywhere as cold as Finland. The tale of how someone fell from grace takes precision if we’re not going to lose the audience. 

And this is particularly true in film, where the close-up makes it so very hard not to feel for a captivating performer. 

It’s one thing to crane our necks down an amphitheatre and watch Greek tragedians declaim from behind stylised masks, feeling the ‘pity and terror’ Aristotle talked about when he wrote on catharsis. Those were plays in which human notions of fairness were simply not relevant, and as such they were written to be performed by figures both more and less than human. 

It’s quite another to see the tenderness on an actress’s lovely face as she laughs and weeps, and still find a story in which the narrative has no interest in whether it’s being fair to its lead character. 

But that’s what gives The White Reindeer its power. It holds us in a state of mesmerised dissonance. The story it tells is simple on the surface, but how it unfolds in our understanding leaves us torn – and because of that, it gets inside us. 

We view its lead as someone we’d have to give space at your hearthfire – and at the same time watch her fall with the impersonality of a blizzard. That’s a truly rare experience. 

Welcome to an ice-hearted fable. 

Pirita was born a witch. She lived a witch. She died a witch. And if that’s not what she wanted – if the screen shows us that – that’s why also we can’t forget her. The White Reindeer combines absolute poise with raw brutality, and there’s nothing quite like it. 

And the compliments of the season to you as we end this review! 

Since it’s Christmas, a couple of fun facts to finish with:

First: ho ho ho, there’s fiction in the fells! If you like stories about cold iron, I wrote two books on the subject that a newspaper called ‘as tart, dark and juicy as a summer pudding’, so here, tip me a Christmas present and boost my sales. tinyurl.com/nvvetupj

Second: curious how reindeer tastes? I’m vegetarian now, but in my omnivorous youth I did actually eat reindeer when visiting family in Sweden. What was it like? Something between beef and venison, flavoursome but mild and very tender. I hate to say it, but it was the best meat I ever ate. Sorry Santa. 

AAAAND FINALLY!

Do you like these essays? It’s for-your-consideration season and the column is eligible for two award: the Hugo Best Fan Writer/Related Work (recommendation sites here: https://www.thehugoawards.org/submitting-your-work/#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20submission%20process%20for%20the%20Hugo%20Award.&text=There%20are%20also%20third%2Dparty,does%20not%20imply%20official%20endorsement.) and the BSFA Best Non-Fiction (Long) – BSFA members can nominate for that. If you’ve been enjoying it, consider giving it a vote/share/general plug, it would mean the world to me.