Antti Tuomainen is one of my favourite living writers – the Finn writes magnificently quirky stories which tend to see fairly dull lead characters’ mundane lives suddenly being thrown out of kilter by some unfortunate event and then them wrestling to try to bring things back under control. In Little Siberia, the fairly dull lead character is a pastor and the unfortunate event is a meteorite striking the small Arctic town in which he lives, leading to his life spiralling out of control. Tuomainen wouldn’t be for everyone and perhaps it’s difficult to translate his unique tone from page to screen, but any fan of the Coen brothers would do well to give it a go. Finland’s leading film composer Panu Aaltio is best-known for his sweeping natural history documentary music but of course he’s very versatile and he flexed his muscles in a way he likely never has before for Little Siberia, writing a score that is likely as divisive as the movie – I think it’s magnificent, by far my favourite musical thing of 2025 so far.

The divisiveness will come from how unusual it is – processed sampled vocals are the prominent sound, running through the majority of the score, and I can see how they might be bloody irritating if you’re not in the mood. But Aaltio does so much with them – always quirky, for sure, but there’s a lot of heart in the melody of the main theme, however silly the arrangement. And that heart gradually reveals itself as the score progresses, becoming genuinely touching at times “Two Men Who Lost Everything” – wow). An array of other odd sounds are thrown in to the mix at various points (it’s actually a bit like a more comedic take on the music from The White Lotus) and I find that after a few minutes I’ve become so accustomed to the strangeness that I’m completely caught up in the spell it casts – and what may in isolation seem like some silly little vignette all of a sudden becomes deadly serious within the context of the whole thing. I don’t really know how Aaltio pulled this off, but he did so with an abundance of flair – this is creative music which is tonally so difficult to pin down, it really shouldn’t work – yet it doesn’t just work, it explodes like a bomb’s gone off in the Crayola factory, splattering primary colours everywhere in the most vivid and joyous way.

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