Director: Jarno Harju
Writer: Jarno Harju
Cast: Ari Nieminen, Jarno Harju & Jermu Mäkinen
Running time: 12mins
After seven Christmasses of Indy Film Library, I’ve had more than a few seasonal stinkers foisted upon me. For my sins, that has included an ironically hopeless Nativity, a desolate Muppet’s Christmas Carol knock-off, and multiple Steven Seagal ‘parodies’. But I must have been good in 2025, because this year I found Miracle of Christmas stuffed in my stocking – a riotous festive fable, crafted with both heart, and characteristic crassness, by Finnish filmmaker Jarno Harju.
I first came across Harju’s work in my occasional collaborations with 2ANNAS film festival – where I presented his short How to Make Finland Great Again as part of a comedy guest programme there. That film sees a jobless man brutalised by the state, determined to make an example of him if they can’t turn him into a ‘productive’ member of society – with his punishment involving a blackly comedic song about “healthy patriotism nourishing the citizen” laughing cyclist in office attire, and not nearly enough lubricant.
That film comes with both my recommendation, and a trigger warning – and the same is the case here. Although, if we’re being fair, It’s a Wonderful Life should also come with a trigger-warning and doesn’t – despite, like Miracle of Christmas, being about a man deciding to kill himself at Christmas. Class prejudice at play? Perhaps. It is, after all, a film which neatly puts everything back in its place by the end – the wholesome wonders of the banking system reinforced as the unseen heartbeat at the core of every American household.
Harju is rather less concerned with reducing things to a conversation between ‘good/bad capitalists’. Like his previous effort, there is a raw and unapologetic disdain for middle-class sensibilities. While the drama at the heart of things still boils down to whether or not a struggling businessman ends it all on Christmas Eve, the not-so-divine being intervening is not remotely interested in persuading him of the good to be done back at the office.
The beginning sees a grotesque, twinkly Christmas theme – the kind of bland nothingness you would find in a Hallmark film – turn out to be diegetic noise blaring from the car stereo, as Atte (Ari Nieminen) slowly pulls into a deserted car park. The trees around sparkle, the snow is pristine – and instinctively, we know this must be Christmas Eve, even before it is confirmed by his enraged boss, who berates him over the phone for some botched project that has cost the firm contracts, and Atte his job.
“Merry fucking Christmas to you too”, bellows his now-former manager, seemingly assuming that even in this moment, his underling would be cowed enough to send glad tidings at this joyless time. Atte says nothing, and ends the call – scrawling a short note on a scrap of paper, as he looks at the glowing lockscreen on his Android, depicting a happy image of his partner and child.
And then, with an almost shrugging resignation, he turns on the ignition – having already connected a hosepipe from the car’s exhaust to his window. But as the fumes cloud his vision, and obscure the outside world, something in the nearby woods is stirring. Suddenly, two pale cheeks loom through the smog – accompanied by a cacophonous barrage of foul wind, as somebody releases a stream of diarrhoea onto the hood of Atte’s pointedly polished black Audi.
Stumbling from the darkening cabin, Atte gives chase to Spurgu, a homeless man played by Harju – who evades him thanks to the disastrously icy paving around the car. And when things calm down, and a deeper, more important conversation begins, Atte is left with a very distinctive stain adorning his face.
Harju is attempting a very delicate balancing act here – attempting to deliver a heart-felt emotional point, without forfeiting any of the fantastically crude edge that is his cinematic calling card – and some audience members may feel that either the importance of the message, or the crassness of the humour are blunted in this combination. But for me, his script strikes just the right balance. It’s not so earnest that it suddenly drives away viewers looking to escape the season’s usual saccharine offerings – but it’s not so bereft of heart that it comes across as being the cliché anti-Christmas cynicism those viewers so often have palmed off on them.
The class-satire of Harju’s earlier work also sees to that – with the dialogue relentlessly unforgiving for Atte, even in this situation. And while that might well come across as insensitive to some viewers – telling someone experiencing a mental health crisis to simply get their shit together is never a good look – it feels appropriate to the story. This individual isn’t portrayed as being in any more acute distress, than the fact his life at that particular office has not amounted to anything.
This leaves Spurgu to ponder, “Why are all you blazer-wearing men all the same? As soon as a deal goes wrong you have a noose around your neck.”
As with How to Make Finland Great Again, here we feel a real, earned dislike of people who mistake being effective in business – making money, and greasing the wheels of capitalism – as the ultimate signifier of a life worth living. Atte’s ‘distress’ here is so skin-deep, so divorced from the things that really matter – the human beings who love and depend upon him – that when he commences his plan in the car, it is with no sense of any emotion – just a kind of begrudging ideological duty: “I’m bad at business – so I am unfit to live, lest I become a drain on the economy.”
At least, in this case, Atte has foregone the family massacre that is such a sadly common story for executives whose wealth is suddenly thrown into question. As though nobody around them has a life worth living without their riches in it either. Personally, I might have enjoyed some kind of reference to that here, as Spurgu examines Atte’s choices – but perhaps making ‘jokes’ around that might have been a step too far, even for this festive short.
Even so, the disgusting degradation of humanity beneath wealth has such a hold on Atte, that it is only a threat to his private property – which he now instinctively elevates to a greater importance than his own life – that sees him stop and think. And the joke at the heart of this take on It’s a Wonderful Life is that if Clarence really wanted to shake a banker from the brink of suicide, planning out a similar act of “faecal terrorism” would probably be the most effective way of doing it.
This has been a real festive treat for me – although it might not have sounded like it. Harju’s film made me laugh harder than I venture anything else in the festive TV schedule will – and reintroduced me to the thought-provoking, dark and acerbic world of a filmmaker willing to take risks most others would baulk at. A Christmas film featuring suicide, anti-capitalist satire, and explosive diarrhoea, which still manages to deliver a genuine, emotional message? It really is a miracle.