Netflix’s Little Siberia: Was the meteorite really a miracle or just a coincidence?

Spoiler warning: This article discusses the full plot of “Little Siberia” (2025), including the ending.

The film’s answer to its title question is deliberate ambiguity: Director Dome Karukoski and co-screenwriter Minna Panjanen, adapting Antti Tuomainen’s novel, withhold the biological explanation so the dramatic resolution can land on its own terms. Joel (Eero Ritala), the pastor of the small Finnish village of Hurmevaara, carries a confirmed medical fact into the story: a war injury from his Afghanistan deployment left him sterile. His wife Krista (Malla Malmivaara) announces she is pregnant. “Little Siberia” never explains how. By the film’s final scenes, Joel has stopped demanding a sign from the meteorite and started paying attention to the person beside him.

What the meteorite actually sets in motion

The film opens with a meteorite crashing through the roof of Tarvainen’s (Tommi Korpela) car on a snowy night. Tarvainen is Hurmevaara’s permanently drunk former rally driver, and the rock’s arrival is its own dark joke: a potentially valuable space object landing in the lap of the village’s least reliable citizen.

The local mayor sees a financial rescue for the dying village and arranges a formal evaluation in London. He recruits Joel, whose background as a veteran peacekeeper makes him the practical choice to guard the meteorite in the meantime. Joel takes the assignment partly out of duty and partly because guarding a rock is easier than confronting what he knows about himself.

Joel’s hidden secret and why it defines the film

Joel knows he cannot father children. The Afghanistan injury is confirmed by his doctors, not a suspicion. He has not told Krista. When she announces her pregnancy, his private response is not joy but calculation: confronting her would require revealing the secret, so instead he begins a silent investigation into the men in her life.

The film traces this surveillance, a cataloguing of suspects, a private conviction hardening into something close to paranoia. For Joel, the miracle-or-coincidence question is not philosophical. If the pregnancy is miraculous, he can accept it without confession. If it is not, then Krista was unfaithful, and everything he has withheld must come out.

The case collapses when one of his primary suspects, Jukkis, reveals that he is also infertile. Joel’s theory has no foundation left. Krista was not unfaithful. She was simply, inexplicably, pregnant.

The kidnapping: Karolina’s role in the plot

Karolina (Jenni Banerjee), the village bartender, runs a parallel scheme to take the meteorite as her exit from Hurmevaara, and she uses Krista’s abduction as leverage to force Joel to hand it over. She planned to betray the other criminals involved and leave with it alone.

Joel substitutes a plain stone for the actual meteorite and, drawing on his peacekeeper training, signals Krista to spin out of the line of fire before shooting Karolina.

The meteorite does not survive the film as a prize. Tarvainen gets hold of the actual rock during the chaos. Drunk and in flight, he drives onto a frozen lake, falls through the ice, and drowns. The meteorite goes with him to the bottom. The mayor’s financial rescue never materializes.

How the film frames the miracle question

Karukoski and Panjanen do not resolve the biology. No doctor reverses the infertility diagnosis. The meteorite’s arrival coincides in timing with Krista’s pregnancy but is never shown to cause it.

What the closing scenes establish is a shift in Joel’s orientation rather than an answer to the medical question. Throughout the film, he demanded external proof of the miraculous while treating Krista as background to his crisis of faith. The closing chapter frames her as the actual evidence he had been looking for: her loyalty through his coldness, and a pregnancy that cannot be medically accounted for, are what the film calls his miracle, without pressing the theology.

Whether a viewer reads that pregnancy as divine intervention, biological anomaly, or narrative convenience is a question the film deliberately leaves open. Joel’s arc from a suspicious, withdrawn man to a present parent does not require the biological question to be settled first.

The source novel and production background

Tuomainen first published Little Siberia in Finnish in 2018. The English translation by David Hackston, published by Orenda Books in 2019, won the Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel and was shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger. Karukoski, whose earlier credits include “Tom of Finland” (2017) and “Tolkien” (2019), co-wrote the screen adaptation with Panjanen. SF Studios and Bufo produced the film, with support from Business Finland.

The film launched on Netflix on March 21, 2025, as the first Finnish feature film released globally on the platform. The cast also includes Martti Suosalo and Rune Temte as Petar, one of two Russian criminals who arrive in Hurmevaara to steal the meteorite.

What the ending changes

The meteorite at the bottom of a frozen Finnish lake is the film’s most direct answer to its own question. The rock that the village needed, that multiple criminal plots targeted, and that some characters treated as a potential divine sign is simply gone. No one is richer. No one was saved by it.

What survives is a marriage that nearly broke under the weight of a sustained secret: his unconfessed sterility, her unexplained fertility, and a long stretch in which Joel looked at the wrong thing for evidence of meaning. The film locates the real stakes not in the space rock but in what Joel nearly destroyed by withholding it. Knowing that going in changes what the meteorite’s arrival actually means to watch.