Lights in the Dusk

Koistinen is a night security guard in Helsinki, spending his shifts alone in the corridors of a shopping centre. His colleagues keep their distance, and outside work he has little company. When a woman named Mirja shows interest in him, he responds to her attention, not realising that she is involved with criminals who want to use his position for their own plans.

Aki Kaurismäki wrote, directed and produced the film, which followed The Man Without a Past in his filmography and came after Drifting Clouds, The Match Factory Girl, Ariel and Shadows in Paradise. Janne Hyytiäinen plays Koistinen, with Maria Järvenhelmi as Mirja, Maria Heiskanen as Aila, Ilkka Koivula as Lindholm and Sergei Doudko and Andrei Gennadiev as Russian characters. The production was a German, Italian, Finnish, French and Swedish co-production made for around one million dollars, and it took about twice that amount at the worldwide box office.

Audiences are fairly consistent in their response: the film holds a rating of 6.8 on IMDb from roughly 8,800 votes and the same figure on TMDB from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 6.6 across 41 reviews places it in similar territory. The result is a modest-scale drama with comic elements, running 78 minutes.