Mielensäpahoittaja (Dome Karukoski, 2014)

An adaptation of Tuomas Kyrö's hugely successful Finnish satirical novel The Grump (an unsatisfactory translation of the title, but then 'Self-upsetter' doesn't really roll off the tongue), this first of all has to deal with the tricky challenge of converting short first-person chapters of railing against some fault or other of the modern world into an actual story. The route taken is to have the fossilised and ultra-opinionated septuagenarian taken in temporarily by his wishy-washy hipster son and his family, and then letting the old git bounce off his exponentially increasingly riled daughter-in-law for comic effect as he rambles on self-righteously and bumbles about with all the aspects of modern life that he singularly fails to understand.
It doesn't take long before we're as irritated with him as she is, and this is in part something that can be avoided when exposed to the character on paper as, unlike a filmic story, a book can always be put down when it just gets to be too much. The characterisation begins to run the risk of ridiculing the aged as hopelessly stuck in the past, but then the fact that there is a linear narrative allows the director to steer the tone away from mere parody and round out the persona through providing some backstory to explain his intransigence and even achieve a degree of poignancy.
A number of the things he rails against will probably not travel well due to their specifically Finnish context, but nevertheless there are also many universal themes and the interaction between the stick-in-the-mud and his exasperated family works well to comic effect. It's not surprising that the author has followed this up with a whole series of books and that a film sequel was made recently: we're in a world which has changed drastically in every way in less than two generations, and the existence of a larger aged segment of the populace who are left behind by this rapid march onwards will continue to be a rich source to be mined for reflection and comedy alike.

6/10