Rasmus Merivoo is an Estonian filmmaker who emerged in the 2000s with a distinct style that merged a variety of tones but usually focused on fantastical elements and folklore. The past decade, however, has found Merivoo attempting to get various projects off the ground to no avail. Like Todd Field, another director who recently returned to acclaim after a prolonged absence (with the great TÁR, after 16 years), Merivoo is back with Kratt, a film that is finally available on digital and cable platforms beginning Oct. 11th.
Kratt is a big, wild movie about a group of bored children in a small Estonian town, and the chaos they bring to life when they are left at their grandmother’s house without internet access. Mia and Kevin’s parents go to a new-age ayahuasca retreat and drop them off at grandma’s along the way, in a town where citizen activists are protesting against the incompetent small government and other institutions that are deforesting sacred land.
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In the confusion of these clashing adults, the children and their young new friends, August and Juuli, bring the titular magical creature to life, something which involves demonic possession and the devil, secretive military operations, sentient artificial intelligence, and even more ridiculousness. The result is a bloody bevy of bonkers comedy, bizarre set pieces, and brilliant allegory. Merivoo spoke with MovieWeb about Kratt and the modernization of meaningful folklore.
Kratt is Based on Estonian Folklore
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Kratt is an undoubtedly strange film, but delightfully so. It splatters blood across the screen and has some silly humor, but it feels like the great kid-friendly films of Amblin, like E.T. It’s unusual for several reasons, not least of which being its incorporation of classic folk tales into a modern metaphor of technology. In Estonian mythology, the kratt was a treasure-bearing creature who could be assembled from various household or natural objects and brought to life through a pact with the devil. Once alive, the kratt would do its master’s bidding, but it had to keep working or else it would become dangerous.
“As a child, I’ve always been drawn to these old folk tales we have here, and they are always a little bit dark. It’s like these messages from the ancient times,” said Merivoo, whose film feels like those antiquated fairy tales which were morbid and grim (or Grimm) compared to the media made for children today. Kratt has a childlike joy to it, with these kids eagerly building something powerful that’s very hard to control, and the film has enough levity and energy to it that the inherently dark, odd concept of the kratt never becomes too disturbing.
“The story of the kratt is a creature that you build out of tools, and you have to give it blood, and you have to sell your soul basically to animate it and make it do things that you want. The story has always been told in the past, and I thought that it would be interesting if we took this story to modern times when we have these different kinds of tools than we had ages ago […] modern tools like telephones and drones and all this equipment that we’re already dependent on as a species right now. It almost feels like the kratt has taken over.”
Kratt is About the Technology We’ve Sold Our Souls To
The technological and cultural themes of Kratt are fascinating. Of course, the titular creature is like a composite representation of the exponential growth of digital technologies in contemporary society, something which has become a popular metaphor in Estonia — there’s a law about artificial intelligence and algorithmic liability there that has been deemed ’the Kratt law.’ In the film, when the children don’t give kratt enough work to do, things get wonderfully, violently weird.
With technology, it ultimately comes down to functionality, and Kratt seems to suggest that if humanity is going to create these powerful machines that do everything for us, we better give it something productive to do with sociopolitical significance, otherwise it will wreak havoc. “The original, old folk tale is about this idea that you make a tool that should do all the work for you if you give it your soul,” explained Merivoo in a way that seems accurate for most users of the internet and smartphones. “But you have to give it work. If you stop giving it work, it will break your neck.”
As such, Kratt goes further in its exploration and is much more ambiguous than simply saying “technology can be dangerous,” using the tech-savvy environmental activists (and their unabashed love of Facebook) to illustrate the positives and negatives regarding technology. Around the world, Facebook and other social media platforms have become extremely helpful in organizing political action and even forms of revolution, as illustrated by the Arab Spring, the current Iranian protests, and even Estonia itself.
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“We had this little Facebook revolution here because of this tool that we had,” said Merivoo. “We can organize stuff on the internet very quickly […] Facebook is like a shortcut to the people, and we used it very positively, because it’s a tool, we can gather input, and we can organize stuff, and we can save the forest — it’s all these things. But at one point, you understand that it has algorithms. It is not that east, it has it’s negative sides also. When you build something on Facebook, for example, it really feels at some point that it takes on a life of its own, and you have to deal with it. You have to give it work.”
Rasmus Merivoo Films His Hometown in Kratt
Kratt is a very personal film for Merivoo, whose life intersected with its production. “I live in the same town that I shot this film. It’s very personal, all these places, and the main characters’ house was the nextdoor house,” continued Merivoo, who saw the microscopic events of his town as a reflection of bigger macroscopic changes that were going on in the world. He elaborated:
Merivoo had help from a variety of friends and townsfolk, and even cast his own children as Mia and Kevin. The Merivoos have a connection with the meaningful but dark, oddball folklore of the past, and Rasmus feels like Kratt is an extension of that storytelling style when fairy tales were much less G-rated.
When I watched the things that happened in this little town government, it was like a small version of the big picture that you can see all around the world. And somehow it felt like if I showed this personal point of view of this little town, it may be that something becomes clearer, that you cannot see when you look at the really wide picture of the space we all live in.
Can Kids See Kratt?
With its blood, violence, dark subject, and bits of nudity, Kratt may not be parents’ go-to choice for family movie night, but with adult discretion, the film is actually an antidote to the watered-down kid-friendly movies of today. It’s not Disney or Veggie Tales, and that’s arguably a good thing.
“As a child, seeing scary things is not bad,” said Merivoo. “It’s something that you have to have as a person in order to have some depth. It’s like the Buddha’s story, when you live inside a castle, and you don’t know anything about death, you’ll realize that the world is completely different from what you thought.” While there are certainly good movies coming out of Disney’s castle (especially the Pixar films), at the end of the day, it isn’t healthy if a child’s diet consists solely of pleasant, sweet, G-rated meals where there are clear ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys.’
“I cannot make characters that are just bad. There are no bad characters. There are different people who have their own ideas of how to make things better,” said Merivoo. “When you show children that there is bad stuff in the world, but the good guys always win, because the good are good and the bad are bad, I think that this is not a real world, it’s something else […] We managed to get this kind of family horror movie genre here. It is not common, which is weird. So parents have to decide when they watch it if they let their children see the movie.”
Merivoo Felt Free to Make Kratt However He Wanted
Merivoo was given a lot of freedom from the production company Tallifornia, and Kratt exists in a strange, unique space of its own as a result. It’s not purely a horror movie or social commentary, and it’s not purely a kids’ film or a comedy, but some fun mixture of both. Merivoo attributes this to the film’s prioritization of art and conversation over finance and profit. “There are so many fears people could have when their main purpose is to make money,” said Merivoo. “These fears are not working with creativity. Making a movie like that is very hard to do. [It’s like] building a box and then building a tractor inside of it.”
With all its eccentricities, Kratt obviously won’t be for everyone, and even someone who loves it might not respond to every element; that’s the consequence of a film that isn’t subject to 100 executive producers, endless focus groups, and eager studio executives. Merivoo wouldn’t have it any other way. “I feel that movies are not supposed to be like hard-coded information, it’s not a program for everybody to download,” said Merivoo, who then defined films in one of the most endearing ways imaginable.
“[Film] is just like a collection of tickles. You go out, and you poke somebody here, and you poke somebody there, and you don’t know where this movie will help somebody, but you hope that there is a place of common understanding of human existence,” said Merivoo. “Movies are not supposed to be programs. It is something else. It is some weird, weird stuff that, you know, is art in general.”
