Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Pietari is a young boy living near the Korvatunturi mountain in the remote Finnish wilderness, where an American excavation company led by a man named Riley is drilling deep into the permafrost. Pietari has been reading old folklore — not the sanitized version, but the original pre-Christian stories — and he's convinced they've unearthed something terrible. He starts quietly fortifying his room and taking precautions his father Rauno doesn't understand.

The reindeer herd is found dead overnight — hundreds of animals slaughtered on the frozen plain, the community's entire income gone. Rauno is devastated and furious. Then, checking a wolf trap set on the hillside, they find not a wolf but an old man: ancient, gaunt, naked in the snow. He doesn't speak. He doesn't respond. He stares.

More old men appear, drifting in from the mountain. They move with quiet, unsettling purpose — drawn toward something. Riley arrives, not to help but to assess. His excavation has gone badly: equipment destroyed, workers missing. He explains what they were doing — excavating what he believed to be the original Santa Claus, sealed in permafrost for centuries, an enormous figure still buried in a block of ice deep underground.

Children from the village begin disappearing. Pietari pieces it together from the old texts: the old men are elves — the original mythology, nothing like the helpers of legend — and they're gathering the children for their master. The frozen giant in the mountain is not yet thawed, but it's getting close. The elves are warming it.

Pietari acts. The children are found safe in a warehouse the elves have been using. Using what he's learned about the creature's vulnerabilities, Pietari rigs a plan. The frozen giant — still dormant in a shipping container, enormous and ancient — is destroyed in an explosion. The threat ends.

In the aftermath, the surviving old men prove trainable. Domesticated, even. Rauno has an idea. They form a company — Rare Exports — and begin exporting the tamed elves, dressed as Santas, to holiday events around the world. The final image is cargo planes being loaded with shipping containers, bound for cities across the globe. Each one contains an original.