Heavy Trip

Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren's Heavy Trip (Hevi reissu) opened in 2018 and won several Jussi Awards in Finland, among them Best Original Score. It became one of the most widely exported Finnish comedies of recent years and a cult favourite in metal subcultures across Europe and North America. Vidgren and Laatio both had backgrounds in Finnish heavy-metal journalism and film criticism, and they drew the screenplay partly from the real lore of the Finnish underground metal scene.

The four members of the Finnish symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal band Impaled Rektum have been rehearsing in their drummer's basement for twelve years without playing a single live show. The singer, Turo (Johannes Holopainen), works at a reindeer-rendering plant; the bassist works at the local library, the guitarist at the supermarket. When a famous Norwegian festival booker turns up by accident in their small Finnish town, the band sees an opening and sets off on a road trip towards Norway, the festival and their first live performance, with a series of catastrophic and comic crises along the way.

It is a broad road comedy and an affectionate parody of metal's pretensions, and underneath both it is a warm-hearted Bildungsroman. The original score (Nopsajalka) holds the comic tone steady. Its commercial success in Finland led to a 2024 sequel, Heavier Trip, which took the original cast on a more international second outing.