Fucking Bunnies

Raimo (Jouko Puolanto) is a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road, middling squash player, who is proud of his liberal leanings. But the arrival of a family of satanists, who have a sex cult, in his otherwise unremarkable suburban tower block awakens his inner NIMBY. This is less to do with how patriarch Maki (Janne Reinikainen) behaves - his chief concerns are borrowing the odd knife to chop carrots and trying to become Raimo's next squash partner - than how he and his family look, with their permanent Kiss-style make-up.

Finnish director Teemu Niukkanen and writer Antti Toivonen's sense of humour may be considerably more risque and juvenile than their countryman Aki Kaurismäki's but they have an equally keen eye for the absurd, mining this set-up for deadpan humour as Raimo tries virtually everything to avoid socialising with the newcomers.

There is no doubt a nod to the middle-class' fear of 'the other' in this scenario but Niukkanen and Toivonen have no intention of letting their message get in the way of a punchline, and the script is bristly with good one-liners even if the narrative runs out of steam slightly by the end. The set dressing is also packed with droll humour, such as the moment when Raimo peeps into his neighbours house to see them discussing how to beat a man hanging from an inverted cross, with a ironing board casually sitting in the foreground. Also, there's no denying that carrots are the most intrinsically funny of vegetables, even before anyone says anything about them. Puolanto and Reinikainen completely sell this scenario by playing it as straight as arrows - something that can't have been easy because of the visual comedy also employed.

The short is topped off by a clever score, which interrupts its general jazz and swing easy listening vibe with sudden outbursts of Einar Selvik and Kristian Espedal's death metal wall of noise Procreating Satan.