I got sent a link to Haunters of the Silence by its director, Tatu Heikkinen, with a nice note attached. Would I like to review it? Yes, of course, though my heart sank slightly. Not because I have anything against indie Finnish directors who have made a film for nothing ($2,000!) with friends and family taking on most of the duties (his wife, Veleda, is co-director, co-writer, co-star and cinematographer). The worry was that I wouldn’t like it and would feel obliged, out of a misplaced sense of personal integrity, to say so. Who wants to kick a struggling artist who’s just getting going?
Well so much for that. I liked it! And you might too, especially if you are plagued by sleep problems. And I mean that in a good way. Heikkinen’s email said the film was inspired by his own experience of sleep paralysis and that it was a folk horror movie of some sort. Both boxes ticked. In fact I looked up “sleep paralysis” on Wikipedia, where the symptoms are listed as if Heikinnen’s movie had written them – “imagined sounds such as humming, hissing, static, zapping”… “fear and panic”… “hallucinations, such as an intruding presence or dark figure in the room”.
All are present and correct in this highly subjective film which kicks off with Heikkinen’s character K (a nod to Kafka, surely) walking along the sea shore with an urn containing the ashes of a loved one, before later trying to get a good night’s sleep, aided by some pills. It is not to be. Almost as soon as the grieving K has climbed into bed his door camera has detected movement outside and sent an alert to his phone. It turns out it’s just an animal, so K silences the alerts and has another go at sleeping, unaware that the alerts are now appearing on the lockscreen like a viral outbreak.
This marks the beginning of a night of escalating mayhem and disorder. As K is bombarded by the full panoply of sleep-paralysis effects, Heikkinen and team go to work on montaging together a subjective impression of what he’s experiencing, until, eventually, that “intruding presence or dark figure” makes an appearance.
Sensory disorder and dissociation is the idea. Images are layered over images, with Eisensteinian cutaways to insects, wet leaves, birds sitting in branches, in what I suppose is the “folk horror” bit – not sure I entirely bought that stuff, but the rest of it seemed of a piece. Dream becomes nightmare and reality is distorted, old memories and recent reality collide. K is assailed by images from a cartoon strip, old photos from his childhood, there’s a stop-motion sequence of bones dancing about which seems to be inspired by the ghoulish master of this sort of thing, Jan Švankmajer.
Meanwhile, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen handles the sonics, which are impressive in themselves. Intense aortic gurgles, whistles, indistinct chanting, wobbly bass synths. She also gets the movie’s only line of spoken dialogue – “It’s OK,” which is some kind of joke because it clearly isn’t.
Running through it as a recurring part of the collage is Madison Cawein, now largely forgotten but – his Wikipedia entry tells us – once known as the “Keats of Kentucky”, whose poem Waste Land inspired TS Eliot’s much more famous The Waste Land. An extract of his poem Haunters of the Silence gives the film its title and is intoned at one point – it’s got the gothic rhythms and cadences you would associate with Edgar Allen Poe.
So, yes, things do get a touch esoteric. But reinforces the sense of a dream or nightmare as something that’s outside the everyday run of things, slightly beyond comprehension.
If this all sounds weird, surprisingly, it actually isn’t. It’s clear what’s happening throughout. Reports on the workings of the unconscious mind are fertile ground for the charlatan, but there’s none of that going on here. Heikkinen and team have approached their task with earnest intent and quite a lot of inventiveness. They’ve made a good film. Phew!
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
