Last year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Estonian art film 8 Views of Lake Biwa translated a Japanese storytelling tradition of “eight views” to a completely foreign Baltic context. Even the title came from Japan’s Lake Biwa in the Shiga Prefecture. This year’s Orenda, a Finnish-Estonian co-production with additional support from Sweden, is also in debt to another culture. This time the place of inspiration (or fetishization) is the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people indigenous to North America. The word “orenda” comes from their culture — though the film doesn’t verbalize that — and refers to a panentheistic invisible power present in all things and all people. Orenda opens the door to a new trend in Baltic and Nordic cinema, which hovers somewhere between inspiration and exoticization in a strenuous effort to tell incredibly patient and artistically labyrinthine stories.
Fresh off her incredible performance in Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Alma Pöysti plays Nora, a successful opera singer and grieving widow (in that order). She has come to a remote island occasionally reminiscent of the depressive coasts’ Ireland is often depicted with to honor her belated spouse’s final request for a specific pastor to preside over his final moment (on the island). The priest is Natalia (Pirkko Saisio, also the film’s writer), and she is in the middle of her own Dark Night of the Soul. These two characters’ antagonism, unspoken respect, and shared processing bring the best out of the two actors. Pöysti is remarkable and will surely be the film’s only relevant commercial asset, but it’s actually Saisio who gives the best performance — though not one likely to garner much discourse due to its resistance against any flare for the dramatic. Her tired eyes and snappy attitude hide a vulnerability that the actress only vents in moderation.
Saisio also undertakes the novel challenge of embodying a woman clergy member, a vocational path denied to women on screen perhaps even more than in real life — recalling another female Christian (or perhaps post-Christian, as one may argue that Orenda falls into) pastor in cinema is a nearly impossible task. A rabbi, perhaps. A priest with a collar? Never. The Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo, thankfully, never lets that fact weigh too heavily though. The significance is exceedingly made insignificant and no shackles of representation are ever put on Saisio; she is simply a spiritual shepherd burnt too much on both ends, in the vein of virtually any other cinematic pastor.
Elsewhere, the film’s remote and somber setting and landscapes, poetic and moving classical music, and spiritual subject matter will inevitably draw comparisons to Terrence Malick. And for good reason, too. Orenda is best served when it’s at its most Malickian. The remote coast’s waves erode the viewer like they do a rocky shoreline, and Honkasalo has the patience to sit in the images long enough to let them actually weather upon the spectator. And then there’s the film’s finest scene, a powerful sermon that Natalia delivers, wherein it becomes easy to imagine one of Malick’s, or even Bergman’s, many clerics giving a similar speech, albeit slightly less liberal than the one given here.
Also borrowing from the book of Malick is the film’s cinematography, which at times ventures into awkward compositions, for both better and worse alternately. Large sections here depend on closeups of the two women leads and their shared intimacy, but it comes at the expense of the grandeur the film angles toward, the effect somewhat unraveling any transcendence the film’s mise en scène elsewhere establishes. The irony, then, is that though Orenda is by no means a bad film and in fact mightily impresses in moments, its inconsistency undermines testimony of any genuine orenda.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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