At EnergaCAMERIMAGE 2025, Jon Blåhed’s Raptures distinguished itself with its stark visual poetry and gripping exploration of cult, faith, and survival.
This year again, for its 33rd edition, the EnergaCAMERIMAGE film festival offered some very interesting visual films, to watch in a UNESCO heritage city of Toruń, Poland.
In their cinematographer’s debut competition (initiated in 2010 due to the festival’s increasing openness to the noteworthy artists and the new film phenomena created by filmmakers), some films stood out for their visual poetry. One such film that is Raptures directed by Jon Blåhed, a Swedish writer and director. It was first screened in its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is a compelling and intense historical drama centred on the rise and destructive fall of the Korpela movement, a radical Protestant cult in 1930s northern Sweden.
The story follows the lives of a couple Rakel and Teodor and their emotional turmoil against cult and spirituality, with an added dose of toxic masculinity.
Rakel is a devout Christian living in the remote far north of Sweden in the 1930s. When her husband Teodor breaks away to form a sectarian cult, claiming divine revelation and leading the Korpela Movement, Rakel is compelled to join despite her growing doubts. The film follows her as she struggles to protect her stepdaughter and keep her family intact amid Teodor’s escalating eccentricity and the cult’s radicalization. Torn between faith and survival, Rakel faces a harrowing moral dilemma as the community around them begins to unravel. Inspired by true events and adapted from the novel by Bengt Pohjanen, this period drama paints a chilling portrait of fanaticism and resilience in a harsh, isolated landscape.
This film brings to the fore themes of coercion, radicalization, identity, and spiritual crisis. The intimate acting by the actors, and the sense of belonging while detached from the rest of world in an icy little town, tells us a story of rawness and emotions running deep. This film touches upon the identity crisis of language and of boundaries by the church which the filmmaker has managed to showcase these using harsh, snowy Nordic landscape as a visual counterpoint to the narrative’s spiritual darkness. The film’s cinematography is indeed striking, using elemental beauty of the icy, stark environment, lingering contemplative shots, showing us emotional isolation and the dread that pervades the characters’ lives.
The film’s visual narrative is restrained yet powerful, deploying minimalistic and deliberate compositions that accentuate the unfolding spiritual and psychological rupture. Snow-covered expanses serve as more than just setting; they symbolize the coldness and desolation that accompany the cult’s grip over the community. Mimmo Hildén is at the helm of the camera and it combines static, long takes with careful deep focus, creating layered compositions that allow viewers to absorb layered meanings within foreground and background actions. These choices immerse the viewer in both the physical environment and the tense, claustrophobic social dynamics at play. The cinematographer’s use of natural light, often muted by overcast skies or low sunlight, contributes to the film’s sombre and haunting mood, mirroring the characters’ internal struggles and lets the audience feel the oppressive weight of fanaticism and the fragility of faith with a intuitiveness.
