Director – Eeva Mägi – 2025 – Estonia – 88m
*****
A young ex-con imprisoned as a teenager for killing his younger brother tries to make his way in present-day Tallinn – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
I am wary of unscripted feature films. There is a reason why most narrative movies are made working from scripts; actors have lines to speak, to help them get a handle on their characters. Technicians have an idea of what they are realising on the screen or the soundtrack for a director. Without a script, most attempts at making a film are liable to founder. And quite probably result in an indulgent, unwatchable movie.
Mo Papa, according to the Festival’s blurb, was unscripted. On the one hand, I fear the worst. On the other, after three years of watching Critics’ Picks at Tallinn, I know the standard to be generally high, and duff films are happily all too rare. Would Mo Papa turn out to be one of those rare blips?
It’s also an Estonian movie, and because this is an Estonian festival, in a sense that ups the ante. So I’m really hoping it’s going to be good.
It starts off with a young man (Jarmo Reha), bald apart from a thick, gathered ponytail, being released from prison, a walk down harshly-lit corridors accompanied by a warder, and I’m immediately thinking that either director Mägi or cameraman Sten-Johan Lill (both of whom are the producers) – or, obviously, both of them, are Stanley Kubrick fans, because this opening sequence employs reverse tracking shots which was one of the great man’s favourite stylistic devices. There’s nothing wrong with this per se – it’s really a question of whether the film makers have anything to say, and can find their own unique voice with which to say it, rather than that they simply want to make movies but have nothing to say, no vision to express.
There’s something else more unique to these filmmakers going on here too. The heightened sound effects and the drone-based music (both credited to a sole person, Tanel Kadalipp, which means the the two elements are integrated into each other) lend a distinctive atmosphere to the piece which continues on and off throughout.
Anyway, as a Brit and a Londoner who has watched innumerable movies set in and around London (some good, some not), there’s a certain pleasure in seeing in a festival in a much less well-known international capital city such as Tallinn a film made there and making great use of its locations. As soon as the man is outside the prison, we’re aware of snow on the ground and freezing conditions (something any November visitor to Tallinn will immediately recognise).
The man has the keys to an apartment that’s clearly been unoccupied for some time; it has the basic amenities – fridge, boiler, window blinds – but not a lot else. He’s clearly not enamoured of the decorative plaque which sentimentally reads, in English, “what is a home without a mother?” and prises it off the wall. The place is so cold that you can see his breath.
The camera follows him to a forest which turns out to contain a burial ground, where he spends time at the joint, candlelit gravestone of Karin (1979-2015) and Elvis (2003-2013). He lovingly clears piled up snow off their carved names and dates.
He takes a tram to a library and looks at a microfiche of an old newspaper article. He reads (and we read), “Eugen Lumi, who killed his little brother, is released from prison; Tallinn may no longer be such a safe place.” Their mother committed suicide some two years later. (Watching the film, this worked as an effective and succinct means of filling in this character’s background; writing about it afterwards, it occurred to be that this is perhaps a little clumsy as exposition and could be better handled. Because, if you’d been in prison for a crime, would you not have been able to request and read newspapers covering your crime?).
Elsewhere, an older man (Rednar Annus) who runs a watch repair shop is working on a watch with tiny screwdrivers. He ignores an incoming voice message from Eugen and listens to local weather forecasts instead. A dial on his store front window gives the temperature as just below freezing. He logs the temperature from the forecast in a exercise book recalling the similar recording of information by the central character of Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022).
After working clearing ice of a stairway leading up to a main road, he makes bird calls round the side of a building where he is answered in similar fashion by a girl (Ester Kuntu), who clearly knows him well. They hug. She tells him he is free. He says he doesn’t know what to do with his freedom. He thought after serving time for his wrongdoing – he left his brother locked in a garage intending to let him out later, but then got fatally waylaid before he could do so – that that would be it, but it doesn’t feel like that to him. He’s clearly remorseful about what happened and has done a lot of thinking about it, which I guess is the idea of how prison is supposed to work.
They walk by the sea and make seagull noises, they talk about his estranged father. (Eugen: “If I met him, I wouldn’t know what to say.”) Later, he runs into his old pal Riko (Paul Abiline), a dwarf. They meet up with the girl and play truth or dare. Riko admits his dream is to travel alone to an island. The three visit a hothouse full of Amazonian vegetation and a parakeet, where Eugen’s ape impressions upset Riko. When Eugen observes of the parakeet, “he’s not thinking about anything, he’s just trying to get by,” he might almost be talking about himself.
One memorable occasion at the austere, wintry beach has the girl encourage Eugen to shout, “fuck you, respectable life” – he’s just a guy trying to live decently, not worry about the rules, even if he has made some bad mistakes along the way. We see him turning up the radio on his work truck to boogie to pop music, which is in marked contrast to his father rehearsing elsewhere as a member of a choir singing popular songs.
The girl remembers Eugen’s dad visiting them at the orphanage. Eugen finds a spider crawling on his coat sleeve, and talks in a kindly manner to it, addressing it as Riko. Thinking of Riko’s island dream, he later designs a Brazilian house floor plan out of fag ends. The pair talk about the three of them going. When, thinking of Eugen’s leaving, she jokingly remarks, “Tallinn is safe”, he reposts, “Brazil, watch out!”
Later, alone in the late evening, as Eugen gazes through a tram window, he is reflected in the glass against the landscape beyond, his hoodie makes him look like a spectre, say the figure of Death in The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957). At the film’s finale, he celebrates the new year, as fireworks joyfully crackle and pop in the sky, by moving around happily waving a can billowing dark, turquoise smoke.
Before that, there is an attempt of sorts at narrative closure – this in a film which meanders rather than positing a plot – when firstly a gang in a car get him to take a ride with a view of getting him to do a dodgy job with them, something in which he wants no part, and runs from the scene, recalling the guilty rather than innocent protagonist of Pusher (Nicholas Winding Refn, 1996). Of course, one of the gang members later catches up with him, resulting in a life or death struggle made all the more poignant for its setting in a run down, derelict house.
Director Mägi doesn’t allow that moment to interfere with her overall freewheeling cinematic flow, which must surely be one of this movie’s great strengths. The piece also has a great sense of urban location and space (very specific to Tallinn) and fantastic performances (of the ‘the camera observes them and lets them do what they do’ variety) from its four leads, the fourth of whom, Eugen’s father, never meets the other three (although Eugen goes looking for him and at one point spots him spending time at the family grave in the forest, although can’t bring himself to get closer of say hello).
Without much dialogue, apart from a little that is improvised in certain scenes, it nevertheless manages to say a lot about the mental health of released prisoners. Despite having accidentally got his brother killed, Eugen seems to be an essentially good person, even if sometimes out of his depth, trying to get by with the help of a couple of closer friends. As such, the movie touches on an essential, universal element of being human, of trying to get things right even when they don’t work out quite as one would wish. But we carry on anyway.
Incidentally, Mo Papa would make a great double-bill with China Sea (Jurgis Matulevičius, 2025), also premiering in this year’s Critics’ Picks.
Mo Papa premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2025.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: