Rukajärven Tie (Olli Saarela, 1999)

The Road to Rukajärvi, lumbered with the hopeless video game-style title Ambush 1941 for the English market, is one of those platoon-scale Cross of Iron perspectives on WWII (as opposed to the massed battle more typical to the WWI trench set-up) that allows room for character development and less emphasis on the futility of war or the idiocy of generals. Not that a Finnish director would have much truck with the latter anyway, the overwhelming opinion on the country's experience seeing it as a victim rather than a guilty party.
Nevertheless, you can't keep a liberal agenda out of a Finnish war film, so it's no surprise the first casualty of the platoon's foray ends up being a Russian civilian. This is also a fair way into the film, and the tension keeps on building with little happening and the forest itself potently taking on the role of lurking adversary, until a thankfully short finale of slow-mo carnage.
Saarela's film doesn't really kick up anything new besides a setting novel to foreign audiences, but the parallel story of the lieutenant lead and the loss of his fiancee is nevertheless surprisingly affecting, and the mise-en-scene makes the most of a fragile band in a dizzifyingly endless and vacant landscape.

6/10