When Soap Operas Try to Scare You (and Fail Spectacularly)
There are bad sequels, and then there’s Nightmare 2: The Nightmare Continues—a film so devoid of terror, tension, or reason to exist that it should come with a complimentary sedative. Directed by Marko Äijö and based on the Finnish soap opera Salatut elämät, this cinematic curiosity is less a horror movie and more a fever dream funded by public grants and unearned confidence.
The first Nightmare film, based on the same TV series, was already a stretch—imagine turning Days of Our Lives into Friday the 13th by adding fog and slow-motion running. But Nightmare 2 somehow manages to be worse. Much worse. It’s as if someone looked at the first film’s negative reviews and said, “We can dig deeper.”
Spoiler: they hit bedrock.
The Plot: A Weekend Getaway in the Land of Bad Decisions
Our “hero,” Jiri (Mikko Parikka), has opened a summer bar on an island. He invites his friends, including Peppi (Sara Parikka, his real-life wife—because why not turn your marital bliss into public suffering), to spend the weekend. Unfortunately, Peppi is haunted by memories of the first movie’s tragic wedding cruise, a phrase that already sounds like something out of a Family Guy cutaway gag.
Things start off normally: attractive Finnish twenty-somethings drink, flirt, and brood in IKEA furniture settings. Then spooky stuff begins to happen—sort of. Lights flicker, people gasp, and at one point, someone might drop a glass. The “horror” is so mild it could be broadcast on a children’s channel between Moomins reruns.
Peppi soon realizes the “nightmare” isn’t over. For the audience, it’s never begun—it’s just a prolonged nap in dim lighting.
The Horror: A Vacation in Mediocrity
Let’s be clear: Nightmare 2 is not scary. Not even mildly unsettling. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being politely tapped on the shoulder by a ghost and then apologizing for getting in its way.
The movie seems to think horror means staring at trees for too long and playing ominous music every time someone opens a fridge. It’s like watching a tourism video for Finland—just colder and with more emotional repression.
Even the ghosts seem bored. They appear, hover, and then presumably leave to find a better haunting gig. You can almost hear them sigh, “We died for this?”
The Characters: Beautiful Faces, Empty Souls
You know you’re in trouble when the scariest thing about your film is the acting.
Mikko Parikka’s Jiri spends most of the runtime looking like a man who’s forgotten his lines but refuses to admit it. His emotional range goes from “mildly inconvenienced” to “vaguely constipated.”
Sara Parikka as Peppi tries her best to convey trauma, but her attempts to look haunted mostly resemble someone trying to remember if they left the stove on.
The supporting cast—composed of other soap opera veterans—are equally lifeless, delivering dialogue that sounds like it was translated from Finnish to Finnish via Google Translate. Each line is punctuated with dramatic pauses, not because of tension, but because the actors are visibly waiting for the director to yell “Cut!”
There’s a subplot involving Aino (Jasmin Voutilainen), the sister of a dead character from the first film, who works in a cottage village and looks perpetually confused—as if she, too, can’t believe she’s still in this franchise.
The Direction: A Masterclass in Doing Nothing
Director Marko Äijö seems determined to prove that atmosphere alone can carry a movie. Spoiler: it can’t. The pacing is so glacial it makes The Revenant look like Mad Max: Fury Road. Scenes drag on endlessly as the camera pans across empty rooms, silent forests, and the audience’s collective will to live.
Äijö’s idea of suspense is to have people whisper about things we never see, while the soundtrack hums like a broken refrigerator. You can tell he wants to evoke dread—but instead, he evokes mild impatience.
By the third act, I was begging for something, anything—a jump scare, a plot twist, a moose attack. Instead, we get more scenes of people walking slowly toward things that are not, in fact, there.
The Dialogue: Written by a Committee of Ambien
There’s a unique poetry to Nightmare 2’s dialogue—a kind of minimalist haiku that communicates nothing. Here’s a rough translation of the movie’s emotional tone:
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something feels wrong.”
“Yes.”
[long pause]
“Let’s go swimming.”
You could play a drinking game where you take a shot every time someone says “I have a bad feeling about this.” You’d be dead before the second act.
The Cinematography: Finland Looks Great, the Film Doesn’t
To its credit, Nightmare 2 does showcase Finland’s natural beauty—forests, lakes, rustic cottages. Unfortunately, that’s all it showcases. Every frame looks like a brochure for a moderately haunted Airbnb.
The color palette is muted, as though the movie itself is embarrassed to be seen. Even the jump scares—few and far between—are filmed with the energy of a tax audit.
The one memorable visual? The credits. Because they mean it’s over.
The Budget: €591,000 That Could Have Been Spent on Literally Anything Else
According to production notes, Nightmare 2 cost nearly €600,000 to make, with half of that coming from the Finnish Film Foundation. This raises important questions, such as: how? Where did the money go? Was it spent on fog machines? Therapy for the cast? Maybe someone should’ve spent €10 on a new script instead.
To think that public funding supported this cinematic hostage situation makes one nostalgic for the days when Finnish tax euros went toward more noble causes—like building saunas and surviving winter.
The Critics: United in Their Suffering
The Finnish press did not hold back. One critic famously refused to give the movie any stars, calling it “pure torture” and saying it “drowns its actors and audience in shit.” Which, honestly, might be the most accurate synopsis of the film ever written.
Other reviewers were only slightly more generous, offering one-star ratings that felt less like praise and more like pity. Watching Nightmare 2 isn’t so much entertainment as it is an endurance test—a slow descent into cinematic Stockholm Syndrome.
The Legacy: The Nightmare That No One Wanted to Continue
Nightmare 2 is the sequel that nobody asked for and everyone regrets. It tries to expand on its predecessor but instead collapses under its own boredom. By the end, it’s not a horror movie—it’s a public service announcement about the dangers of producing sequels to soap-opera spinoffs.
You could argue it’s so bad it’s funny, but even that would require effort from the film. It’s not campy. It’s not ironically entertaining. It’s just… there, sitting on your screen, like an IKEA shelf you forgot to assemble but now feel too guilty to throw away.
Final Judgment
⭐☆☆☆☆ — One haunted sauna out of five.
Nightmare 2: The Nightmare Continues is cinematic NyQuil: it’ll put you to sleep long before it scares you. It’s a movie so committed to mediocrity that it becomes an endurance art piece.
The only true nightmare here is realizing you could’ve spent those 90 minutes doing literally anything else—like watching paint dry, or arguing with a reindeer.
In the end, the film does live up to its title. The nightmare does, indeed, continue—just not in the way the filmmakers intended.
