As the Nazis make their scorched earth retreat out of Finland, Aatami (Jorma Tommila), with a satchel full of gold crosses their path.  The Nazis view his treasure as a way to secure their escape from the law now that the war is ending, and their regime has fallen.  Aatami, however, is a skilled mercenary and will not give up his gold without a fight even though he is only armed with a few knives and a pickaxe. 

Jalmari Helander writes and directs Sisu which was released by Lionsgate after it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival.  It generated some buzz as it cycled through the various festival circuits, ultimately winning four awards at the Catalonian International Film Festival, including Best Picture.  The 91-minute action thriller was heavily inspired, as cited by Helander, by the character of Rambo, specifically First Blood (1982), and while it swaps war-torn Vietnam for Finland at the close of WWII, the lineage is not hard to see.  Stylized like a spaghetti western – or a Karjalanpiirakat western in this case – the story is about as simple a man vs man template can get while leaning into the tropes and hallmarks of the genre that make for a pulpy and animalistic experience. 

The film is not for the faint of heart as it is a brutal and bloody endeavor with a similar disregard to the human form as S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk (2015) and with the simplicity of concept as seen if Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising (2009), there is not much in way of a plot for those who may not find enjoyment in the gore to latch on to.  One of the more upsetting sequences comes early in the film when Aatami’s horse steps on a landmine and is, in a word, obliterated.  The camera holds on to the very visceral carnage left behind, and in this way, it is Sisu at its cruelest moment given the innocence of the creature.  The troop of Nazis which Aatami will make short work with, while beaten and brutalized in increasingly absurd and creative ways, at the end of the day it is still Nazis being turned into mincemeat so there is still a sense of justice being served.  

Aatami journeys through the land with the Nazis hot on his tail, and while the initial encounter is heavily stylized to set the tone, the film quickly enters into the realm of absurdity with just how much damage he can take, and also how much he can inflict on the vastly overpowered troop.  For audiences who can make that hurdle and leave a sense of realism behind, the film will unfold for them far more gleefully than those looking for something more grounded, and they will be treated to Kjell Lagerroos’ blood-splattered vistas and a heart-pumping, inspired score by Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä.  Split into six distinct chapters, Juho Virolainen’s editing can focus more on the propulsion of the individual sequences and not need to worry too much about bridging the gaps between the shifts in the story as the titles cards serve as an effective, easy, and stylistically consistent way to move between the different set pieces.  What keeps the narrative feeling fresh is that each of these chapters plays out like their own short film with a subsequent climax that resolves Aatami’s problem de l’instant before moving on to the next thing all loosely connected by the overarching motivations of keeping the gold and killing the Nazis. 

Sisu, like many films in the vein, utilizes CGI to help increase the insanity of the set pieces, but Helander also opts to use practical for quite a lot; especially in terms of the makeup and gore design.  This works well for the close-ups, especially in the later throws when Aatami takes some brutal and impossible hits, but when the film opens up wide enough that it needs generated effects, it loses some of that visceral feeling that kept it so engaging in the first place.  For what was probably a small budget on a short schedule, the effects work is pretty solid, but narratively it takes us further from the hand-to-gun combat that was so exciting in the first acts.  It is strange because on its own, the final set piece is quite thrilling, but it just seems a bridge too far even for those who were onboard with the wild nature of the film to this point. 

The last aspect to touch on is that the Nazis are not traveling alone.  In the back of one of the trucks in their caravan is Aino (Mimosa Willamo) among some of the other young women they took hostage during their raiding of villages on the road of retreat.  Thankfully, the film is not explicit about the abuse the women were witnessed and subjected to, but they occupy a strange space within the film and audiences do not need any additional reasons to want to see the Nazis destroyed.  Also in silent roles, the women do play a part in Aatami’s final showdown once he is aware of their presence, but despite a few scenes which will conjure up memories of Mélanie Laurent’s role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), their presence does little for the film.  Early on, we learn about their presence before Aatami, and while they do make for a bit of heightened stakes in that Aatami needs to be careful about how he selects his targets, since he opts for hand-to-hand combat more often than anything and does not have access to guns, tanks, and bombs, it is a moot point.  Their inclusion in the narrative does pay off late in the film when Sisu adopts a grungy Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) styled race to the death across the dirty, dusty roads which makes the penultimate set piece more thrilling than the aerial finale. 

Sisu, despite its guts, gore, and rough-and-tumble nature, plays out like a long setup to a joke because that is exactly what it is.  Hopefully, for audiences, the punchline to “why did the gold miner cross the road of Nazi-occupied Finland” delivered at the end of the film is not too campy and groan-worthy that they can leave the film satisfied.  Within the context of everything that came before it, it is honestly a rather delightful way to end the film; funnier yet when it is realized that the only words uttered by our silent hero is essentially a dad joke.