Giving it their Best shot
A Finnish crime drama investigates the mystery behind a teenage girl’s disappearance, set against the backdrop of a Helsinki suburb in the late 1980s. Director Saara Saarela and executive producer Minna Haapkylä introduce All the Best Girls.
When director Saara Saarela first received an offer to take charge of Finnish drama All the Best Girls – a follow-up to 2022 drama Summer of Sorrow – she wasn’t sure she should accept the invitation.
Saarela was drawn to the mystery drama’s focus on a pair of teenage girls and the fact the story was set in the late 1980s. But her uncertainty stemmed from the fact the original series, known locally as Munkkivuori, swept the board at Finland’s Kultainen Venla (Golden Venla) Awards in 2023 when it was named best drama series, star Laura Birn received the supporting actress award and creator Jani Volanen took home the screenwriter and director of the year prizes.
Set in the Helsinki suburb from which the series takes its Finnish title, Summer of Sorrow’s story centres on the disappearance of a young child, which forces the adults in the neighbourhood to take justice into their own hands – with tragic consequences. Meanwhile, children living in the area become detectives themselves, led by new arrival Mirko, leading to the discovery of secrets that test teenage friendship, love and loyalty.
“The first season here in Finland, it received a lot of awards and everybody loved it,” Saarela (Memory of Water) tells DQ. “It was a nostalgic trip to the 80s, and there was even a fan club that went on tours to the area where it’s actually set. My first reaction was that I can only screw it up because it was such a hit here. But then little by little, you just get to know the characters and get into that world.”
Saarela subsequently agreed to join All the Best Girls, known locally as Munkkivuori season two, and directed all eight episodes from scripts again written by Volanen. The new season is now set to debut on Finnish streamer Elisa Viihde this Monday ahead of its international premiere at Content London on Wednesday.
Again set across two timelines in the late 1980s, the new story introduces 16-year-old Lola (Rebekka Baer), who moves to Munkkivuori after escaping her uncle. Poor and magnetic, she quickly disrupts local teen cliques and befriends Nina (Tinka Andersson), who takes her in. Their summer is filled with parties and dreams of a trip, but Lola hides a secret job. Tensions then rise when she comes between Nina and her boyfriend Pete, and Lola mysteriously disappears. While she is initially thought to have run away with a band, her abandoned belongings in the forest hint at something far darker.
As past and present collide, the fate of Lola promises to keep viewers hooked through a story that reveals illicit relationships and community secrets while touching on themes of family trauma and generational abuse.
To begin with, however, All the Best Girls is a slow-burning drama that takes the first episode to introduce the world of the show, Lola, Nina, its numerous supporting characters and the dynamics between them before the central mystery starts to emerge.
“It does take on pace once the characters are in place,” Saarela says. “One of the things I was really drawn to was the fact there is a mystery, but it’s also about the friendship of these two girls and the youngsters living in this neighbourhood and their families. It will all come out in the eighth episode. I’ve never read a script like this before, and this is what I’m quite happy about, that we were able to keep the tension until the eighth episode so that you don’t know who’s done what, where she disappeared to and what happened.”
“Jani is really a fan of slow-burning things where you don’t know what you’re looking at,” notes executive producer Minna Haapkylä, head of scripted at series producer and distributor Rabbit Films (Mobile 101, Queen of Fucking Everything). She’s also an actor and plays a small role in the show. “You really don’t know if it’s a mystery or what it is about – and he loves that.
“It’s hard, because everybody wants to see the action, who’s dead, what has happened, and that’s something Saara and I talked a lot about in the first episode, that we have to accept Jani’s way of writing. We really honoured his way of thinking and didn’t change [anything]. So it’s a slow burner. It’s the first episode’s end that says that actually something bad has happened to Lola.”
Then having been introduced to so many characters, from friends and family to the members of a rock band, “there’s so many people that, really, you don’t know until the end who’s actually the guilty one,” Haapkylä notes. “But we know something bad has happened. It’s all in the air, it’s in the atmosphere, it’s in the music. They will discover the truth.”
Yet the investigation into the true nature of events happens without any traditional police presence. Instead, Nina and others take it upon themselves to explore how Lola changed over the summer and look into the reasons why.
“But they keep it as a secret among themselves. They meet up and they discuss, and then we cut back to the summer and we show those events and what happened during that summer,” Saarela says.
The director admits it was more difficult than she expected to create a way to differentiate between the two timelines, as they take place just a few months apart, from summer to autumn. “So the summer is warmer, we used filters. The colours are more bright and [the camera] is handheld most of the time, or moving,” she continues. “Then the fall is more monochromatic, with a still or fixed camera. The camera is not moving with the characters, but it’s more still. So we did make that distinction, but in the beginning, it was so easy to read in the script because it always said, ‘It’s fall, it’s summer, it’s fall, it’s summer.’ But when you are actually doing it, it’s not really that simple.”
Filming also mirrored the two timelines, taking place across three weeks of summer before production moved to a studio for five weeks. The shoot then resumed outdoors in the midst of autumn.
Across the series, the camera stays close to Nina, who is “more or less” the central character. “That’s why we wanted, especially in the summer [scenes], to always have her in the centre and be quite close to her and really capture her feeling towards her friend,” Saarela says. “She’s so mesmerised by her because she’s completely different from what Nina is, coming from a broken family, sleeping in the woods, so there’s a mystery to her and she gets involved with that.”
On set, the younger cast members worked with an acting coach who guided them through the tight production schedule, rehearsing with them and identifying the key scenes and lines to emphasise.
“But something I was thinking afterwards, and what Amos Brotherus [who plays Nina’s brother Daniel] was saying, was that once he knew the end, he had to make sure he didn’t unconsciously show his hate towards [those involved in Lola’s disappearance]. He’s not supposed to know anything,” the director says. “I was actually thinking that maybe I should not have shown the last episode to the cast at all, so that they only found out [later]. But it was not possible, because we shot it in a different order.”
That so many children were on set meant shooting days were time-restricted, and “big choices” were taken when it came to deciding what to shoot. But filming in Helsinki proved to be a bonus for cast and crew alike, as it meant they could stay at home during production.
“That’s something that logistically was fun to do,” Haapkylä says. “You stay here at home, and the kids can stay at home. So that was really the best thing.”
Notably, All the Best Girls was also the first time Rabbit Films had worked with BAFTA-owned Albert, the screen industry organisation for sustainability, in a bid to reduce the production’s environmental impact. On set, an eco-coordinator was present at all times, leading to a 30% reduction in waste, “which is a huge amount,” says Haapkylä. “What was funny is that when you ask people what was different, and how was it harder [under new environmentally friendly practices], people were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t notice. Oh, what happened?’
“You think a little bit about what you eat, where you put your waste, and what you do with plastic bags and bottles. On the set, you have to take your own water bottle – really simple things. It was really [easy], and it was because of this coordinator. That was a really good thing.”
Saarela and Haapkylä now hope All the Best Girls will provide a mystery that will grip viewers, as well as a relatable experience for those – in Finland and around the world – who grew up as teenagers in the 1980s.
“The first season, because it was such a massive hit in Finland, we thought it was easy to relate to being a child in Europe in the 80s. We have this connection,” Haapkylä says. “But actually it wasn’t. It’s a special thing to be Finnish or French – everybody has their own specialties. But this season, the world of teenagers is more universal. That’s why we’re hoping it will click.”
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tagged in: All the Best Girls, Elisa Viihde, Minna Haapkylä, Rabbit Films, Saara Saarela, Summer of Sorrow