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Despite what you may presume from the title, 'Zombie and the Ghost Train' (1991) is not a horror film. In fact, it does not abide by any straightforward film genre conventions, instead slotting nicely into the unpredictable and often unclassifiable world of the late eighties to early nineties indie film. Zombie (Silu Seppälä) is in fact the nickname of the character for whom this film is a kind of impressionistic study of. Based in Finland Zombie is a typical indie film outsider, an alcoholic army dropout who’s only skills are drinking and playing the bass guitar. By giving Zombie these twin characteristics, the film provides an interesting Nordic take on two themes that have been explored sporadically but with varied results throughout movie history, the life of a fatalistic drinker and the aspiring musician. Although the bleak and starkly minimal style means we never get too psychologically involved in Zombie’s motivations and aspirations (or lack of as the case may be), it is geographical location and accurate attention to detail to the world of the struggling musician offers a fresh take on classic outsider themes.
Narrative-wise the film works as an extended biographical flashback sparsely narrated by Zombie himself. The opening reveals him waking up on a bench in a bleak, damp, grey cityscape. From there he proceeds to enter a bar, order a drink, and light up a cigarette despite the morning having only just began. It is here that Zombie proceeds to reflect on how he ended up in such a sorry and desperate state. His rejection from the coldly regimented world of the army came about due to ‘mental health’ issues, although two comedic scenes showing Zombie adding turpentine to the soldiers’ soup and sleeping peacefully against a tree undisturbed by the nearby noise of bombs being tested give a great early impression of Zombie’s lazy, despondent, and shockingly fatalistic nature. He returns to his rural home in Helsinki to live in the childhood bedroom of his parent’s house, a touch that suggests straight away one of the film’s major themes, that of the arrested development and extension of childhood that is often afforded to the professional musician. Not being confined to the usual responsibilities and strictures of daily nine to five work and with a long lineage of outré rock and roll behaviour clichés to bask in, musicians, whether hugely successful or simply talented but un-ambitious like Zombie, are often given to destructive lifestyle choices. This freedom gives rise to Zombie’s crippling reliance on alcohol although thankfully the film expresses this without resorting to typical “sex and drugs and rock and roll” tropes. Zombie’s alcoholism is not sociable or particularly enjoyable. In fact, he does most of his drinking alone either in his bedroom or at a depressingly deserted and basic local bar. Even when Zombie, through sheer petulance and pathetic begging rather than romantic gestures, manages to win his childhood sweetheart Marjo (Marjo Leinonen) back from her new hairdresser boyfriend (itself seen as an emasculating profession somehow inferior to the macho world of rock music), they move in together, but Zombie still spends many of his waking hours at the same bar drinking alone, only occasionally engaging in drunken babble with an indecipherable old man. The character of Marjo herself also happily escapes the rock film’s cliché of the nagging uncomprehending girlfriend or wife who blocks the artist’s creativity. Instead, she encourages Zombie to play his bass and join bands, and while she doesn’t approve of his constant drinking, she at least tries to help him until one night when it his failure to come home pushes her over the edge. Zombie clearly loves Marjo but struggles to express it to her, in the same way he struggles to express anything emotional. His relationship with his parents is similarly numb and repressed. Halfway through the film Zombie’s father, against whom he has a vague childish rebellion despite his obviously caring nature, dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. Rather than inspire a new level of maturity or a sense of familial responsibility in him Zombie simply isolates himself further and uncaringly gets so drunk that he contracts alcohol poisoning the night before his father’s funeral causing him to miss the proceedings much to the chagrin of his long-suffering world weary mother.
The only person Zombie manages to engage with in any meaningful way is his friend Harri (Matti Pellonpää), the lead singer in a charmingly entitled group called Harri and the Mulefukkers (sic). Harri is warm and friendly and in a film with very little in the way of dialogue the two friends’ conversations offer not only the most blackly comic passages but also the closest insight we get into the troubled main characters mindset. Despite prior knowledge of Zombie’s unreliability and drinking problem Harri tentatively offers Zombie the role of bassist in his locally popular band who play an incongruous Finnish take on Southern Americana country music, hoping the distraction will give him a new lease of life. The band tours with Zombie in tow and the sequences set on the male-gang mentality governed space of the tour bus give rise to some of the funniest and most extensive sections of dialogue. At one point the bands members and manager exchange amusing stories about past bass-players and their erratic nature all while Zombie is passed out in a nearby bunk unaware of how his new band mates are unintentionally prophesising his fatalistic nature. It’s funny and very well observed as the band is played by actual musicians popular in Finland and so their tales and the performances, we see blur the line between documentary and fiction, another way in which the film successfully escapes any known generic trappings. However, after drunkenly missing a few rehearsals Harri sadly has to fire his friend and Zombie flees to Istanbul having burned so many bridges and tried the patience of all those closest to him. The film enters its bleakest section at this point. Istanbul is presented as even more empty and cold than the snowy rural spaces and grey concrete city haunts of Finland and so reflects Zombie’s further descent and regression from normal human interaction and existence. However, the resulting scenes also contain Zombie’s most revealing dialogue. Throughout the voiceovers that prompt the flashbacks are minimal but poetic. Phrases such as “I was like a lost tree, it’s heart devoured by loneliness” and “My brain is a maze, I can’t look myself in the mirror” reveal little apart from the typical self-loathing and despair of a hardened alcoholic. However, by the time the ever-concerned Harri tracks Zombie down in his self-imposed exile he resorts to bleak confessionals. When pushed on why he left Zombie simply states “I owe nobody nothing” while his utterance of “sober I can’t make it” is a heart-breaking semi-confessional. Harri sees that Zombie is now beyond help and so resigns himself, as the viewers by now would have, to the fact that Zombie’s life will not have a particularly happy ending. Aside from these brief glimpses into Zombie’s mindset he remains almost frustratingly blank, but then again perhaps there is simply not much to know about him. Revealing more about him may have risked romanticising his condition. Instead, Zombie remains a sad character with not much to say and hardly anyone to say it too.
Aesthetically the film mines a cold mise-en-scene of bleak wintry nothingness. The default colours are grey and white, a blank slate that like the main character himself does not reveal too much at all. Camera movement is suitably minimal, and several wide-angled long-shots often entrap Zombie in the unforgiving and unwelcoming landscapes he inhabits. He stands out against the snow-covered land though because of his appearance. Proving that all fashion is cyclical he wears the kind of black sprayed-on skinny jeans that are now popular although his teased jet-black mullet is possibly less likely to see a resurgence any time soon. Harri on the other hand wears his band’s uniform of a cowboy hat and tasselled jacket throughout. This leads to some lightly comic scenes in Istanbul where he is constantly hassled by street sellers who believe him to be a real American who might be easily duped into buying a so-called ‘magic carpet’. And the mysterious Ghost Train of the title are a rival band of Harri’s who stalk Zombie throughout the film catching him at many of his weaker moments. They offer him a ride home after his expulsion from the army base and visit him while he is asleep in hospital, leaving a book called The Living Dead on his bedside table. They look like a European Velvet Underground and are never heard to speak. In fact, if Harri had not in one brief scene acknowledged them as a band that “has many gigs but no one has ever heard them play” I’d have suspected that they may have been a figment of Zombie’s booze-addled mind. Their presence is always unsettling and almost magical in its unreality, so I was disappointed when they disappeared from the film without mention towards the end, although expecting any kind of linear narrative arks from a film of this style is largely pointless.
The film’s overall minimal, bleak style and its concern with societies desperate yet artistic outcasts recalls Jim Jarmusch’s work and it’s revealing to learn that he and Zombie’s director Mika Kaurismaki are friends and very occasional collaborators. Kaurismaki also used to have a similar reputation to Jarmusch in his native land, that of a mysterious but well-respected indie auteur, and like any perennial outsider indie auteur he wrote, produced, directed, and even edited many of his films, including this one. Since the mid-nineties however Kaurismaki has left Finland to live in Brazil where he now devotes his considerable talent to documentary film making. In some ways the parts of Zombie and the Ghost Train that involve real musicians, especially the ever-engaging Pellonpää, are the most compelling so it’s no surprise to learn that the director has turned to exploring non-fiction filming instead. Ironically, the film’s most disappointing element is its use of music. The two full length Mulefukkers songs we see performed live are rousing and it is easy to see why their incongruous take on the most American style of music remains popular in Finland but apart from that the musical choices are uninspiring. Anytime we hear a rival band playing it is usually some generic rock jam and the actual non-diegetic score is anodyne, trite, and now sounds terribly dated. The films main success is the portrayal of the minutiae of the typically downtrodden and hopeless local musician, even though it does not get the sounds quite right. It’s vague and non-judgemental character study may prove too blank for some viewers expecting psychological motivations and deep revelations about the lives of outsiders. However, it’d be hard not to be impressed with the way the film constantly defies the clichés that could have arisen from the often hackneyed subject matter of the life of an alcoholic wannabe rock star.
Country: Finland
Budget: £222,011
Length: 88mins
Pub/2008
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