A bit of narration at the start of Sisu makes it clear: this is gonna be some mythic shit. World War II is on its last legs and the flailing Nazis, we’re told, have adopted a scorched-earth policy as they retreat from Finland, burning down everything in their path. But then: “Deep in the wilderness of Lapland, there is a man…” And so we meet Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), a former soldier who’s turned his back on the battle. He’s here with just his horse and his dog, living off the land, searching for gold. And soon enough, when a group of Nazis attempt to kill him, we see what he’s capable of. It involves stabbing a knife right through one of their skulls, shooting a shotgun up through another one’s head, and using landmines as explosive Frisbees. So begins 91 minutes of gnarly, pulpy, relentlessly entertaining fun.
Director Jalmari Helander pulls no punches — or kicks or shootings or stabbings — wallowing in excess and rarely taking any of it seriously. As Korpi gets into scrape after scrape, outwitting the Nazis as he goes, slicing and dicing across all manner of terrains, each time escaping seemingly inescapable situations, you increasingly wonder, “Okay, so how the hell is he gonna get out of this one?” And yet he does, each time reality and logic losing little bits of integrity, unapologetically.
Ultimately, it’s all about the effortlessly charismatic Jorma Tommila.
This is a slight but tight epic, dealing in firm absolutes. Korpi, a one-man army, is pitted not just against the Nazis, but against the landscape they’ve devastated. Riding his horse past corpses hanging from telephone poles. Cooking dinner by his tepee while planes roar overhead. Grimacing at the glow of distant explosions on the horizon. The bad guys, meanwhile, are exactly that, no more, no less. There are no grey areas here — these are very much your dyed-in-the-wool evil Nazis, no sides to them, no humanity peeking through. Across the board, Sisu doesn’t offer up wholly fleshed-out characters, and for the most part that’s not a problem — the archetypes work. In the case though of a group of female sex slaves, stuck in Nazi trucks for the most part, some richer character work wouldn’t have gone amiss, especially considering that particular subject matter.
Your take on Sisu might depend on how much silliness you can stomach — by the time it reaches its Looney Tunes ending, any semblance of reality has gleefully skipped away. But this film knows exactly what it is, and is so much fun. It is fantastically (but not upsettingly) violent, the bountiful dismemberments and impalements heightened by squelchy sound design, and there are brilliant practical effects — it’s a prosthetics playground.
Ultimately, though, it’s all about the effortlessly charismatic Jorma Tommila, a walking snarl, a granite face, a body more scar than skin, the whites of his eyes — sometimes mad, sometimes messianic — shining even brighter when encased in a face caked in blood and mud. He gives us one hell of a time.