While horror makes wild claims of “based on a true story” from time to time, not every instance seen in the genre is a gimmick formed from a shred of truth. Quite the opposite is 2016’s Lake Bodom (a.k.a. Bodom), a film based on a well-documented true story — a true crime, in fact. The real-life inspiration for this offering of Finnish horror also has the distinction of being a famous cold case; from a legal standpoint, the Lake Bodom Murders were never solved. And it is in that room for speculation that Taneli Mustonen’s film found its story.
Lake Bodom has all the right ingredients for a typical slasher: teens, camping, the woods, and most importantly, a killer. And for that first portion of the film, that is exactly what Mustonen and co-writer Aleksi Hyvärinen delivered. Using a tragedy plucked from local history as its backdrop, the story starts off with more creep factor than other films of a similar nature. The characters here are just as guilty of stepping foot in an ill-famed and foreboding location as other fictional fodder, but unlike the countless Crystal Lakes of horror, Lake Bodom is undeniably real.
On June 5, 1960, three young campers, fifteen-year-olds Maila Irmeli Björklund and Anja Tuulikki Mäki and eighteen-year-old Seppo Boisman, were all killed at Espoo’s Lake Bodom; a fourth victim, and the only one to survive, was Björklund’s boyfriend Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson, also eighteen. To this day the assailant has yet to be officially identified, and the murder weapons were never recovered by police. Naturally, a film like Lake Bodom opens with a text crawl that covers the fundamentals of the crime as well as leaves audiences with something of a hook at the end. That scrolling preface concludes with the crucial line “this movie was inspired by those stories.” And, of course, by “stories” they are referring to commonly held theories about the case.
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Image: Nelly Hirst-Gee, Mimosa Willamo, Mikael Gabriel and Santeri Helinheimo Mäntylä.
So even though Lake Bodom skips the reenactment component expected from these kinds of true crime-based films, it does find a rather clever way to revisit the past without also being set in the past. Instead, the story is squarely contemporary, seeing as how leaked nudes influence the characters to leave their city and go to Lake Bodom. The victim of that scandal, the religious Ida (Nelly Hirst-Gee), escapes her ongoing troubles at home with best friend Nora (Mimosa Willamo) and two boys from their school, Elias (Mikael Gabriel) and Atte (Santeri Helinheimo Mäntylä), in tow. What then looks to be nothing but young folks partying it up in the woods, like their cinematic ancestors did, is really something more specific and attuned to modern horror.
True-crime consumption has reached new heights in these current times, and Lake Bodom picks up on that reality with more indifference than initially predicted. If anything, Mustonen underplays the leading motivation for Atte and Elias’ trip — they, in their morbid fascination, want to reconstruct the Lake Bodom murders — along with most tangible elements that would immediately time-stamp the story to nowadays. Cellphones and computers are scarce or simply glossed over, and any investigation into the original Lake Bodom case is minimal and analog. In general, Lake Bodom is almost anachronistic in its presentation.
In spite of its starting points, this film ultimately fails to fit into that strain of horror where characters set out to solve a mystery, then fall down a rabbit hole with no chance of coming back up. Ida and the others never get that far. In place of a long and fatalistic inquiry is an honest-to-god, second-act shift into slasher territory that only adds to the confusion over Lake Bodom’s horror leanings. Even that inclination to believe the boys have a hidden agenda is proven wrong once one of them is, and unhesitatingly so, butchered in the style of the original murders.
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Image: Nelly Hirst-Gee and Mimosa Willamo.
Lake Bodom is apt to cause whiplash with its various plot developments, some more predictable than others, however, these switch-ups do more than keep viewers on their toes — they give the film an edge over its contemporaries. This multi-faced horror curio even has the gall to readjust itself not once but twice following that brief dip into the slasher pool. It goes from layered and vicious vengeance replete with in-fighting to nearly poetic comeuppance for the wicked party. As convoluted as this all sounds, and as much as it feels like four different films stitched together in haphazard fashion, Lake Bodom is weirdly coherent, if not preposterous.
A sense of preciousness would be assumed — maybe even hoped-for or demanded — given how Lake Bodom draws on a bona fide, not to mention well-known, crime. In contrast, Mustonen’s film takes big yet not unwarranted swings when pondering the original 1960 incident; he is acting on a popular theory or two, albeit with the tendencies of torture horror to make his take more effective and shocking. And although respectability is always difficult to guarantee in dramatizations of nasty realities such as murder, Lake Bodom is never as indecent as those other genre films that outright reimagine misfortune and border on true-crime fanfiction. Perhaps its worst offense is getting carried away with conjecture.
Mustonen was not the first filmmaker, and will likely not be the last, to use Lake Bodom in a horror context. However, in Gergő Elekes and József Gallai’s 2014 Hungarian film, Bodom, the story is told using found footage. Regardless of this and other differences, though, the two films needle in a mystical quality about the lake in question. Elekes and Gallai embrace the notion vaguely but more openly, resulting in an eerie outcome, whereas Mustonen’s execution is verging on magical realism. Daniel Lindholm’s dreamy cinematography only intensifies that opinion, especially once Lake Bodom shares its final and most bizarre twist.
This is not the easiest film to digest, and not because of its subject matter. Its tactic of changing directions at the drop of a hat, along with a constant need to outdo itself, is not for everyone. Meanwhile, that impulse to toy with the narrative only gives Lake Bodom an advantage in the busy subgenre of headlines-ripped horror.
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Image: Help, or danger, approaches in Lake Bodom.
