Sisu is the return to form that Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s fans were hoping for. If he’d died after his feature debut, 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, he could have shuffled off to Tuonela knowing he’d made a funny, grisly Christmas movie like no other. But he followed up with Big Game, an attempt to weld Helander’s dark ethos to something more obviously Hollywood (it starred Samuel L Jackson), which not only didn’t quite satisfy either camp but also diluted the Rare Exports story a touch.
TV work followed and now Sisu, a dark, bloodlusty, periodically howlingly funny film that reverses Helander out of that corner. First Blood is the inspiration, Helander says, though John Wick is a more current reference point for this tale of a lone gold prospector who gets lucky out in the wild wastes of nowhere and is then pursued cross-country by Nazis. It’s 1944 and the Nazis (led by Aksel Hennie’s dogged officer Bruno) know that the war is lost – they want this bearded old man’s gold to help them build a new life afterwards. But what they don’t know is that they are dealing with Aatami, a legendary commando, now retired, who has already sent hordes of Russians to their deaths and will shortly be doing the same to the Germans if they upset him. Which they do when they chase him into a minefield and his much loved horse is blown up under him. They’re also beastly to his dog. And as anyone who’s seen John Wick knows, this is something you should not do.
Sisu is a Finnish word and concept which (reaches for Wikipedia) translates as “stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience” – badassery, in short. And both Helander and Tommila put on a magisterial display of it once the plot is wound up and the bloodletting begins.
Like Wick, or Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, Aatami has smarts as well as skills and a high pain threshold. He also, like the other cinematic legends, seems to be almost immortal, thwarting repeated attempts on his life in ways that are audacious and grimly practical, like the way he manages to survive drowning by… I won’t give it away except to say a) it’s a new one b) it’s plausible c) it’s grim.
“He just refuses to die,” says Aino (Mimosa Willamo) admiringly. She’s one of several Finnish females the Nazis are using as sex slaves and they act initially as a useful explicatory device before coming into their own a bit later as weapons are distributed and Tarantino’s slo-mo ensemble walk gets another outing.
The old man who will not die – whether he’s shot, drowned, stabbed, hanged, immersed in a bog… and more – is played by Jorma Tommila, Helander’s star of Rare Exports, and now a man in his 60s. Whether you’d describe what he’s doing as acting is hard to say. His face is almost entirely obscured by beard, or dirt or blood, but Tommila is a plausible killing machine, lean, wiry, taciturn, the incarnation of the bleak, blasted Finnish moorland where this all takes place.
This isn’t a very expensive movie – some wide open spaces and a few vintage vehicles. Occasionally it feels as if the continuity might be a bit off, as if it’s been made in a hurry and not all the tweaks were done that might have been done. Blame the pandemic, if you like, but it barely matters. The broad strokes are all it needs and they are all in place. Like Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä’s score, which is refreshingly dirge-like and funereal rather than bombastically large, a low-key counterpoint to the action, which eventually wanders so far into the territory of the bloodily absurd you’ll spit with laughter.
Sisu – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
