Mark Reviews Movies: EUTHANIZER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 19, 2018

Here's an ugly and cruel film with a purpose. The purpose of Euthanizer isn't revolutionary or subversive, though. It is simply to show the ugliness and cruelty of which humanity is capable. The fact that writer/director Teemu Nikki intentionally has made the film look ugly and has indulged in portraying an assortment of cruel acts is, in a way, the entire point. There's a simplicity of intent and purpose here, but it's fascinating to observe how fully the film embraces its nastiness.

It's often difficult to watch, too. The story opens with Veijo (Matti Onnismaa), a part-time mechanic, as he explains his side job. He euthanizes animals at a low price and on the cheap.

Smaller animals, such as cats and guinea pigs, "get the gas," which turns out to be a pair of hoses connected to the exhaust pipe of an old, junky car with the seams of the windows taped closed. Larger animals, mostly dogs, "get a bullet." He'll lead a dog on its leash into the forest where his roomy shack of a home is located, and once he has found an appropriate spot, well, the only thing that's left is to bury the body. Veijo has a system in place. The body of an animal is placed into a cloth bag, and he pours lye on the corpse to help with decomposition. The side of his house is littered with carrying cages, and the trees in the forest are decorated with collars.

Is this cruel? It's definitely odd, but it's not illegal. At the start, we have no reason to believe that this man loves or even much likes animals, but he's providing a service that any veterinarian would do. They would call it "mercy." Veijo seems to think along the same lines. Part of Veijo's system is to play soothing music in the car as the carbon monoxide flows into the interior. He also gets the pleasure of scolding the animal's owners for the poor ways that they have treated their pets.

That appears to be what makes Veijo tick: not so much the chance to put a sick or ill-treated animals out of misery, but to force the owners to confront their own tendency toward cruelty—no matter how small or banal those acts of cruelty may be. Whether or not Veijo likes animals is beside the point. He hates people, plain and simple. Animals have an excuse for any kind of transgressions they may perform, because, after all, they're just animals. People have no excuse, because they should know better. Veijo wants them to know that. They may not change their ways, but at least Veijo can have the satisfaction of telling a person how terrible he or she is, with the evidence of the person's wickedness right in front of them.

This is more or less the setup of the story, as Veijo encounters a series of animal owners whose pets are sick, seem miserable, or have been neglected in some way. Veijo scolds them, although, in the case of a man who brings a neglected dog to his home, he makes the guy sit in the dog's cage, locks the cage, and closes the car's hatchback—just to give the man a taste of the pain he made his pet endure.

The story offers two counterparts to Veijo: a nurse named Lotta (Hannamaija Nikander), who is caring for Veijo's ailing father (played by Heikki Nousiainen) in the hospital, and Petri (Jari Virman), a mechanic who believes he has found some sense of belonging with a local gang of white supremacists. The relationship between Veijo and Lotta is as twisted as one might expect, considering the film's basic premise. He doesn't like people, obviously, but he is entranced by her fascination with his side job. She's into rough sex, mostly involving choking, and Veijo, who has little experience in such things, almost kills her during their first encounter.

A side plot involving Petri, who's ripping off the garage where he works to get the gang some supplies, eventually gives the film a more direct kind of plot. Mostly, it has to do with Petri's dog, a mutt that he can't train properly. He brings the dog to Veijo, who takes pity on the poor animal and starts caring for it. Petri is an outcast—annoyed by his wife, unappreciated at his job (for obvious reasons), and bullied by the gang members. When his family realizes that their dog is still alive (He lied that it had been hit by a car), Petri takes Veijo's display of genuine mercy toward the animal as a personal insult. He demands some money from the euthanizer and believes that dominating the man might make the gang look at Petri more favorably.

All of this predictably descends into violence, but there's a sense of tragic inevitability to it. None of these characters has the capacity to understand each other, whether it be Veijo's generally misanthropic attitude, Lotta's macabre interest in death, or Petri and his gang's hatred of people just because of their race or ethnicity. There are some explanations for some of these characters' attitudes: Veijo has a late monologue about his father's abuse and how it led him to an act for which he is convinced he is damned, and Petri is only looking for some form of human contact, even if it's with a group of guys who are fueled by hate.

They have more in common than they might expect, but those common traits keep them at a distance from each other. Euthanizer understands this and sympathizes with it, but the film also understands that such malice continually feeds on itself until that is all that remains.

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