Bookended by quaint, domestic lakeside sequences, the narrative drive of Matti Kassila’s art noir, Tulipunainen kyyhkynen (US: The Scarlet Dove), feels like a thrashing fever dream that descends on one anxious man in a single night on the streets of Helsinki. Olavi Aitamaa (Tauno Palo) is an aging doctor married to a young, energetic wife named Helena (Gunvor Sandkvist) who receives a letter from a secret lover; Helena is unaware that Olavi has read the letter, let alone that he has followed her into the city for an assignation with the other man. As night befalls Helsinki, paranoia befalls Olavi: watching his wife in another man’s arms shatters not only his heart, but his sense of reality. The Scandinavian city becomes a surreal fun house of grotesques, illusions, and chance encounters in the dark: a blind shoelace vendor who laughs incessantly, a nameless woman with multiple personalities, a bloody corpse draped across a stadium’s bleachers. Even Olavi’s desperate embrace of God (in the form of a pastor) seems unable to provide comfort. Osmo Lindeman’s eerie score of sudden piano screeches and dull pounding percussion adds an aural layer to this brilliant depiction of one man’s Kafkaesque collapse from emotional trauma.