Yes, the name of the movie is ‘MIS?’. No, as of this writing, it’s not on IMDb or LetterBoxd. That must be a big oversight by the distributor or production company and someone should do something about that. I like to check movies before I see them. The only reason I decided to see this was that it’s by an independent company. I like to see those out of interest. Sometimes quite morbid interest.

This movie did not get good reviews, but I’m going to be a bit more positive. (TL;DR)

We follow a group of quite diverse friends. Well, Finnish diverse, meaning that they are all white, but they seem to live very different lives. The main character is an online witch. We first meet our group as they celebrate her reaching 10k followers on socials. That might not seem like much, but considering how many people live in Finland, that’s pretty much everyone. Anyhow, there are different takes on this within the group. The interesting ones are by one male member who takes a rational view (although this isn’t written very well) and another female member who is quite hesitant to participate in a Tarot reading (although they never call it Tarot – is this an IP issue?). After yet another member draws the Death card for the latter, she disappears and the rest soon (after weird experiences) decide to try to find her.

Now, if you are not Finnish and even many Finnish people don’t know about this, but there is a strong tradition of witchcraft here. And specifically is. It might be more fashionable now, but it was never really eradicated. Actually, while witches were being burned all over Europe, in Finland the authorities often just decided that they would rather just let the witches do their work than face the wrath of the locals who depended on them. I do believe this history is an important motivation and inspiration for the film.

There’s a name for a place that gets repeated over and over and yet I don’t remember it. It kind of sounded like some kind of a magical place from local tradition. Within the movie, it is the place where our wannabe witch finally has to cross into being a true witch. This includes self-sacrifice, self-discovery, rituals, hallucinations, sex and finally an actual crossing from the real world to the metaphysical.

There is all sorts of weird things going on in the film, but – as an outsider – there is a feel of following Finnish traditions and folklore. The problem is that if your understanding of witchcraft comes from American movies or something similar, this whole thing will feel very different from that. Well, I prefer local ideas in my movies from outside of Hollywood. You can’t compete in budgets, so compete with something else.

Now, this is not a good movie. The performances are not always very good and are quite one-note, the story feels like it’s all over the place at times, and at times the movie feels like it was hastily scrabbled together in the editing. For example, there’s one scene in which two characters say some lines but they are out of shot, which definitely feels like it was added in post when they noticed they were missing something. Also, they could have added something in post. Maybe make the third act a little more dreamlike or something. Now that comes purely from music and lighting in one specific scene. Otherwise it’s just natural light and pretty static images.

Is it worth a watch? Depends on what you are looking for. I’m not unhappy with having seen it. It is still interesting despite all it’s flaws and the way it approaches Finnish witchcraft and how it juxtaposes with the online version is nice.

So, yeah, I’m not at all helpful here.