Continuing my trek through films submitted for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, I watched the Finnish entry, the dark, disturbing film Euthanizer, which seems to start out as a revenge-fantasy story and ends up in an even bleaker place by the time the film wraps up. It’s also quite short, under 90 minutes, and the script sticks the landings on most of its gymnastics, although a film this tight probably needs a more limited thematic focus. It’s streaming free for amazon prime subscribers.

Veijo is the euthanizer of the film – he euthanizes pets as a side job, charging less than the local vet, but seems only willing to take on such cases if the pet is being mistreated or is otherwise ill, emphasizing that he only does this to end suffering, not, say, to help someone get rid of an unwanted pet. He lectures owners who bring their pets to him for how they’ve mistreated them – cooping up a cat in a tiny apartment, ignoring signs of illness in a dog, buying a guinea pig as a pet without getting it a companion. Veijo’s father is in the hospital in the late stages of some kind of terminal disease, in a good bit of pain, but Veijo’s caring for the suffering of others doesn’t extend to his father for reasons we’ll learn near the story’s end.

Veijo’s strange, solitary existence, punctuated by facial expressions worthy of late-career Harrison Ford, is interrupted by two visitors: the nurse who’s taking care of his father and hears him discussing his side gig, and a local thief who falls in with a white supremacist group and wants his dog put down strictly for reasons of convenience. The nurse is obsessed with death, and seduces Veijo, which leads to the most bizarre sex scene of the year, but she sees in him a fellow traveler without understanding the reasons why he euthanizes select animals but not others. The white supremacist, who looks way too much like the bassist/actor Flea, is about to lose his job at a mechanic’s for stealing tires, which he then resells to his racist buddies while trying to get into their ‘gang,’ and spends much of the film screaming at his wife on his phone or raging against nothing at all while sitting in his car. There’s a third subplot with the local vet, who appears to be more motivated by money than by any love of animals, that doesn’t work as well and serves mostly as a plot device to send Veijo off the rails for good. Veijo runs afoul of the white supremacists (not hard to do), which begins a back-and-forth revenge pattern that is satisfying at the start but ends in utterly gruesome fashion that throws the meaning of everything that came before into question.

There’s a clear point here about how we either treat animals far worse than we treat other people, as if they’re not even sentient, or how we treat animals better than other people, although Euthanizer doesn’t do enough in either direction. The film also doesn’t give us enough about Veijo until the very end of the movie to explain why he is the way he is – both why he euthanizes pets to prevent further suffering and why he’s isolated himself from just about everyone else, at least until the nurse pries her way into his life. There’s certainly satisfaction in watching him dress down people who have abused or neglected their pets, and there’s even more in watching him go after the white supremacists – who are amusingly stupid and, fortunately, never do anything racist on screen in the movie, instead just talking about how tough they are – but the final scene falls short as an explanation of everything.