Lost Boys

There’s a nightmarish quality to this documentary from Joonas Neuvonen and Sadri Cetinkaya, which entirely befits the subject, namely a descent into drugs from which, for one man, at least, there was no return. Its story is related in the first person – although Tom of Finland’s Pekka Strang narrates Neuvonen’s thoughts – as Neuvonen attempts to play detective after his friends go missing in Thailand, while also offering a sort of psychological confessional of his own mental state.

It helps if you know that Neuvonen was a drug dealer, with reference to his subsequent jailing providing a framing device of sorts for this film, and that he previously made Reindeerspotting – Escape From Santaland, which documented the exploits of young Finnish drug users Jani an Antii. They are central to this follow-up, which unfolds after the pair of them had finished serving a seven-year sentence and the trio go on a hedonistic trip to Thailand.

Neuvonen captures the excesses of the trip – which are sometimes presented excessively here – including industrial quantities of alcohol and explicit scenes of drug taking along with plenty of sex with the bar girls. In this opening portion, the directors shows just how beguiling places like this can be for young, hedonistic westerners, where just about anything can be bought, in Finnish terms, cheaply, but where it’s also possible to lose track of the space between fantasy and reality. It’s easy to see how Jani falls for the charms of one of the girls – a word I use deliberately as many are barely adults – while also observing the general modus operandi of these relationships, which involves the women keeping the men happy, or as the film puts it, ‘infantilised’ with a supply of drugs. The plight of the women forms a key part of the later section of the film, showing that while the westerners may, in a sense, entrap themselves in what they view as a hedonistic ‘heaven’, the street workers are already caught by circumstances, and often, trafficking, in their own seventh circle of hell.

After three months, Neuvonen returned home but his friends stayed on, moving their party to Cambodia and, after they disappear, with Jani ending up dead, Neuvonen goes back in a bid to try to find Antii. What happens next feels like a sort of freefall trip through both the director’s subconscious and the Cambodian underbelly. Well edited by the directors, along with Venla Varha, the action has a kaleidoscopic vibe, as striking images of life at street level emerge alongside insights into Neuvonen’s often-ambivalent motivations. Although threatening to be a little to portentous and over-stylised for its own good in places, this is nonetheless a compelling walk on a side that’s so wild, some become so lost they never make it out.