Another Day to Live Through (2023) Majestic Finland, Less Majestic as a Psychological Thriller (Review)

In the last few years, horror and thriller movies have been slipping out of corners of the world not usually associated with darker storytelling standards – Lithuania, Malaysia and beyond. Peter Simmons has worked in short films as an actor, director, writer and producer for a number of years, and with the fatalistically monikered Another Day to Live Through, he makes his feature directorial debut, but unlike it’s Scandinavian brethren, Finland isn’t associated with either TV or cinema on the international scene. Before getting into the moving parts of this new movie though (which is released on digital platforms through Reel2Reel Films), it has to be asked – why aren’t more movies produced in this stunningly beautiful country? If this movie achieves nothing else, it advertises the boundless, unlimited potential of Finland’s massive expanses.   

Another Day to Live Through is a two-hander set in a wooden cabin and the immediate land surrounding it that is told with a dizzying non-linearity. We join Satu (Lene Kqiku), and military veteran Lauri (Timo Torikka), for a psychological thriller in the middle of nowhere – the former being a young woman holidaying in the solitude of the Finnish countryside to help with her mental health, while the latter is, by his own admission, anti-social. Now, a young woman in the middle of nowhere meeting a solitary older man would be a red flag for most – a sign to get the hell out of dodge before things take a turn (we’ve seen the movies, we know what happens), yet she continues, and what follows is a strange back and forth of danger and abuse. With blunt force trauma, kidnapping, and drugging to contend with, we witness Satu’s compromised mental state getting worse by the moment – and with Vincent Price’s Last Man on the Earth playing on a seemingly endless loop on a tiny CRT TV, we have all the components laid out by the writer/director.

The wooden cabin has a lot of connotations when it comes to genre cinema, but I’m sorry to report that Another Day to Live Through is not that sort of movie, nor is it the slasher that the poster implies. Instead, it’s a predominantly plotless affair that jumps around from one event to another with no real linearity – the opening scene featuring Satu being what I can only assume would be the end game in any other movie, with her naked and covered in blood after some kind of dramatic altercation. After that there are moments of deja vu, bouts of esoteric narration as conversations fail to correlate with on-screen actions, repetitions of lines of dialogue from Another Day to Live Through and The Last Man on Earth – some of which Satu constantly repeats for no rhyme, reason or contextual relevance.

After all, psychological thrillers and horror movies often make little sense, and Simmons feature debut is no different.

The scene in which Lauri reads notes from his captive’s bag offers some glimmers of a narrative coda to deconstruct, but personally, there’s little to help connect the dots. There are moments of disassociation where characters faces become blank, featureless canvases – but these are just “moments” with no real context. Psychologically motivated movies are often the most emotional as the characters are often presented at their most broken, and it’s through spending time with them that we understand their world and their emotional fragility, yet thrillers that fall into this category can often be emotionally devastating when everything lines up. Unfortunately, Another Day to Live Through doesn’t pull its themes, ideas and characters together in a satisfying enough way for any of its obliqueness and aloofness to connect, either as a story or character study, and although the title may suggest that we share in Satu’s struggles, it doesn’t play out that way.

This new Reel2Reel title is a better movie than it is a script thanks to the two actors accommodating everything their bilingual and fluid roles demand. The cinematography is gorgeous – beyond the stunning expanses of rural Finland, and the non-linearity playing off the mystery keeps things moving nicely. Peter Simmons clearly has a lot of potential and ambition, but he’s unfortunately come out of the gate with one of the trickiest genres to manage. Psychological thrillers are right up there with comedy horrors as if they work they can be amongst the best stuff in the medium, but if they don’t, it leaves way too much to the imagination.

As the old adage goes, “It’s how you leave them that matters”, and Simmons leaves you with a gorgeous, Nordic, dark, ambient folk song in the style of Wardruna or Heilung, but performed by Daisy Coole and Tom Nettleship, and its incredible, spellbinding stuff – worth the price of admission alone.

Rob’s Archive: Another Day to Live Through (2023)