This very Finnish film is about life, love and death with much of the atmosphere and background supplied by Finnish Lapland. The plot is simple: boy meets mysterious girl and they fall in love, as their roads cross several times. They get together, but the girl carries a secret to which the boy is blind, she is suffering from an incurable disease and the time they can spend together is limited by her more and more prolonged hospital visits till in the end she dies. The boy never understanding the reason behind the repeated rejections finds consolation in nature. In Hollywood this would have been a perfect recipe for a tearjerker, in Finland it makes for a subtly beautiful, melancholy and philosophical film that moves deeply, but not cheaply.
