Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Dark Paradise

One of the most discussed Estonian films of the year, Dark Paradise is a strange beast from one of the country’s most promising and rising young talents, Triin Ruumet. The 35-year-old’s second feature doesn’t tiptoe around such complex and controversial topics like Neo-Nazism, kink, BDSM, and half-sibling incest, but that list makes the rather dark film sound more inflammatory than it presents. In truth, watching Dark Paradise is like partaking in a drunk, sloppy kiss: it’s not good, but it does amuse in its strangeness. The film begins at the funeral of half-siblings Karmen (Rea Lest) and Viktor’s (Jörgen Liik) father. The two clearly have neither a good nor healthy relationship with each other, and, on the night of the funeral, Karmen and her drunk friends invite Viktor into a hot tub for a “baptism” of manhood. They dance, splash around, and clumsily shake their bodies all over the shy and incel-coded Viktor, before tying him up and tattooing a swastika and penis on his face. After one good cry, Viktor embraces the non-consensual tats and becomes something of a small-town terrorist in league with the local biker gang. Karmen translates her grief into kinky sex instead.

Opening in media res, the relationship between the grieving adult children and their deceased father never requires explanation or background. Even if he was a different father to both, he took care of each of them financially. It’s clear he spoiled Karmen, resulting in her whiplash behavior and repugnant episodes, and it will be easy for viewers to lose sympathy for her, particularly after her veritable cruelty in the hot tub. Viktor, on the other hand, remains an easily sympathetic figure on the basis of his shyness and victimhood, until he looks himself in the mirror and decides to embrace the swastika and the murder such a symbol entails.

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