The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs from Friday, 2/27 through Sunday, 3/1 at the Emerson Paramount Center, and through 3/23 virtually. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and follow along with my multi-outlet coverage at Boston Hassle and There Were No Gods Left.
Aurora
Old wounds fester into new ones in Aurora. The Estonian film follows the titular woman, played by Maarja Johanna Mägi, as she navigates two loves—across two timelines—and a conservative religious family. Aurora and Joonas (Ott Kartau) celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary as a former lover (though not too former) reenters her life at the wrong time, revealing their now-ended extra-marital affair in the process.
As Western cultures become less religious, religion is often shown as black and white in cinema. It’s great to see a more nuanced story of trauma and love unfold in Aurora. Aurora’s family isn’t just religious; she is a pastor’s daughter. Her dad mostly means well, but he just can’t meaningfully connect with her. He speaks in violent analogies involving hammers and swords; she speaks in riddles of passion loaded with mystery rather than violence. They live in different worlds. His pastoral belligerence eventually gets the best of him when he makes a decision, together with Joonas, that reshapes the family forever. Co-directors Andres Maimik and Rain Tolk appear comfortable with the complex contradictions of the simultaneously nourishing and destructive religious culture. This might be most evident in the titular character herself, who never forsakes her faith and even prays with one of her extramarital lover’s other lovers.
Aurora’s adulterous associate Lenny is played by Jörgen Liik, who tragically died in July of 2025 at just 35 years old. Liik was best known for his role in Rainer Sarnet’s November, a genre-transgressing folk-horror romance. He also had a big part in a film about as strange as Aurora called Dark Paradise. In the latter, he plays a lonely young man named Viktor desperate for connection who, against his will, has a swastika and penis tattooed on his face. Viktor lets his new markings define the kind of man he would become. In his final performance, as Lenny, Liik leaves a remarkable—and sadly, prophetic—final impression. Caffeinated and eccentric, like Heath Ledger (who also left us too early), might be the best way to label his overtly label-less acting. He had a bright future ahead of him and Estonian cinema is dimmer with his passing.
Maimik and Tolk’s film is rich in clever symbols and innuendoes. The funnest of these might be a game of sword play (with actual swords) with an erotic touch to it. These aren’t the only swords they would like to play with, the playful cinematography winks. The hammer and nail sermonic symbols are less fun but crucial to making sense of the kind of masculine Christianity that Aurora must confront.
Mägi, in addition to being one of the 2025 European Shooting Stars, is one of the most exciting young faces in Baltic cinema. She has a knack for both deviant and sensual physicality. Aurora lets her lean into both of these strengths. Her character has a habit of letting her intrusive thoughts get the best of her. She just eats a fistful of dirt with no immediate explanation beyond a need to somehow express the insuppressible emotions she is experiencing. On another occasion, she fakes being passed out and sticks her tongue out several inches for her “savior” to embrace with a wet kiss. She also bites another man’s ear. Predicting what she might do next is a losing game, especially as Aurora. The ineffably weird and always watchable Nicolas Cage might be her closest peer.
No doubt some of this strangeness can be explained through the irregular production. According to Mägi, as she relayed to me after filming, “I didn’t have a script. I just had my character and then we started to improvise. The directors had the story; they knew where they wanted to go. But we didn’t know it. None of the actors knew. Then we started to improv.” The freedom she was given then also suggests these idiosyncratic physical actions flow from her natural—perhaps, theatrical—acting inclinations. Wherever they come from, Mägi is never a boring watch.
Entertainment isn’t Aurora’s biggest limitation. Avoiding spoilers, I will simply say that Aurora makes a decision that confines rather than liberates herself, and that decision feels foreign to the free-roaming character we’ve grown with over two hours. The non-chronological editing may be the thorn: Aurora’s past transgressions feel as if they are still in the present, which, though helpful with the experiencing of her very big emotions, hinders our ability to see her move past Lenny. He is very much still in our present (as he is in her emotional present). She makes a sad, deliberate choice to hide the sinful secret of another, but the darkness of her choice—trapping herself into a life in a morally shady place—is only inferred.
Red Code Blue
The early years of post-Soviet independence quickly became a favorite time period among Baltic filmmakers, and for good reason. It was a period typified by enthusiasm, trepidation, transition, and occasionally chaos. The murky uncertainty makes for a natural genre ally, and that’s what Oskars Rupenheits does in his second directorial effort. Red Code Blue, the fourth highest grossing film in the history of Latvia, mirrors the initial hopefulness and then cynicism of the period vicariously through an idealistic young cop.
Romāns Skulte (Raitis Stūrmanis) is new to his precinct in Riga. His co-workers predate the country’s independence, some by a few more decades than others. He comes as a man on a mission to do things the right way. No one else feels that same urge and he quickly makes a departmental pariah out of himself. His officer colleagues are corrupt, quick to pull the trigger, and even quicker to weasel out of work. At best, they are jaded versions of what he will become.
The sweeping crime epic holds its box office record for a reason. At a strong two and a half hours, Rupenheits gets plenty to work with as he slowly moves Romāns from an eager reformer to a hardened pessimist. It’s not a hopeful film, either. The system remains corrupt—inescapably so—at the film’s end. Going against the grain of the overarching police film genre, the egg isn’t bad; it’s the whole system that is broken. It produces nothing but bad eggs.
Red Code Blue is effectively punctuated by moments of comedic levity, though even these jokes poke holes in the integrity of the police force. In one scene, two officers in supporting roles pass time in the office by playfully shooting a pistol’s magazine into a wooden door. One of them bet the other the door would stop the rounds. The two dimwit policemen slowly realize the bullets went through the door, and then through another door, and then through another door that happens to the office of their chief. We knew this all along, seeing the bullet holes on the furthest door in the background while they were still making sense of the first holes. The joke takes a dark turn that calls into question the qualifications necessary to join the force to say the least. Are these idiots really making Riga safer?
Just like Romāns, the innocence of independent Latvia has been chipped away through a reckoning with the broken systems of democracy. The crime and corruption—racketeering, smuggling, and theft—reflect the exaggerated extremes of the failures of capitalism too. They are crimes that grow from the failures of the new capitalist system.
One of the most impressive elements of filmmaking comes through its soundscape. The score, from composers Kaspars Kurdeko, Pēteris Vasks, and Uģis Prauliņš, mixes traditional Christian music along with more intermittent original material to define the film’s dark moods and complement its complicated themes. Most impressively, they wield caesuras, the silence between notes, to create a creeping disorder: tick, pause, pause, tick, tick. These moments without music work like a dutch angle whose tilted perspective tells us that something isn’t quite right. The Latin hymns do something similar through irony too as they often accompany bloodshed. Another element of the soundscape distracts: the sounds of melee combat like punching and punching but with guns. The sounds are quieter than we are used to, similar to the way a silencer affects a gunshot. They have no vitality. These sounds are, as a whole, minor kerfuffles in a good film. They did, however brief, pull me out of this epic crime saga that I didn’t want to leave.
The photography is also grabbing. Cinematographer Juris Pīlēns’s shot of the Latvian capital’s skyline after the film’s violent climax politicizes the epic further by turning the city’s architectural pluralism into conflict. The vintage Old Town holding the frame on the left and symbolized through a church’s spire brings the past into conflict with the present and the city of the present to the right, symbolized through the high-rise Ministry of Agriculture glass tower. The juxtaposition recalls the age difference between the greenlegs of Romāns and his pre-independence holdover co-workers: the old swallows the new. It’s a past so ingrained that it doesn’t get erased by new writing.
Aurora
2025
dir. Andres Maimik & Rain Tolk
111 min.
Screens Sunday, 3/1, 3:40pm @ Emerson Paramount Center
North American premiere
Co-director Rain Tolk in attendance
Red Code Blue
2025
dir. Oskars Rupenheits
150 min.
Screens Sunday, 3/1, 6:40pm @ Emerson Paramount Center
North American premiere
Q&A session with director Oskars Rupenheits, DOP Juris Pīlēns, producer Sinitija Andersone, lead actor Raitis Stūrmanis & location manager Amanda Rēvalde to follow screening.
