Sisu

To what level you enjoy Jalmari Helander’s Sisu may depend on your tolerance for two things: severed limbs flying through the air and extreme violence towards Nazis. Personally, I’m reasonably fine with the former and positively giddy about the latter.

In all my years, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film with such satisfying displays of brutality and gore as Helander gives us with his fantastically intense and surprisingly comic film. I can take or leave gratuitous horror and heavy-handed "grit," but Sisu is somehow both neither of these and the complete embodiment of them all at once. This is a film as frenzied and bloody as they come, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t entertaining as hell.

Set in northern Finland during the final days of World War II, Sisu (a Finnish term that loosely translates to mean “the kind of white-knuckled grit and determination that manifests when all hope is lost”) begins as an aging prospector discovers a gold vein on the desolate tundra. With the German army largely defeated and in retreat, the remaining officers and soldiers enact a scorched earth policy as they leave the country, killing and burning everything in sight.

After a chance encounter with a beleaguered Schutzstaffel platoon leaves our hero (technically named Aatami Korpi, but you wouldn’t know it from him because he never speaks) sans gold, the Nazi-killing begins in glorious fashion with a survival knife jammed all the way through a Wehrmacht head. Simply outstanding.

And thus begins a nearly non-stop barrage of death and destruction that would make even John Rambo green with envy. As we come to learn from a band of captured Finnish women under guard in a troop transport, the prospector stalking the Germans is no ordinary man. During the Winter War (a short-lived 1939 conflict between Finland and Russia), he was known as "Koschei" or "The Immortal," a skilled fighter who personally killed hundreds of Russians and who could not die. “You and your men… are already dead.” says the irresistibly defiant Aino (Mimosa Willamo). 

From a production standpoint, Helander presents this homegrown explosion of body parts as a throwback to the good old days of ‘60s and ‘70s Italian and Spanish exploitation "Spaghetti Westerns" and, by extension, the post-war Japanese samurai films that influenced them. The desolation of Finland’s Lapland region (shot almost completely during the “magic hour”) serves as a perfect stand-in for Spanish desserts (which were meant to represent Mexico for American audiences), and the heavily stylized violence, while much more extreme than its decades-old counterparts, could have come straight from the mind of Leonne, Corbucci, or even Kurosawa or Kobayashi had the technology for such bloodshed existed in their day. In fact, check out the climax of Kurosawa’s 1962 film Sanjuro for an early example of extraordinary bloodletting. (It's really something and an obvious influence here.)

Although Sisu occasionally strays into a realm best left for franchised superheroes, Helander never lets these sometimes cartoonish antics detract from the fun. After all, we don’t enjoy these movies for their adherence to realism. If we did, there probably wouldn’t be four John Wick movies or a Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But where Sisu really outshines many of its genre contemporaries is in how easy it is to loathe the villains and want to see them killed in the most horrible ways. Often, villains are presented as misunderstood or as having similar goals as the heroes but achieving them in different ways. Not Sisu — no, no, no. These assholes are Nazis, and just like Indiana Jones taught me when I was just a wee lad, "I hate these guys." This return to truly detestable villainy is a refreshing turn that I didn’t even realize I missed. 

Sisu definitely won’t be for everyone, but for those of us who enjoy comically well-timed landmine tossing, gratuitously fulfilling revenge, and Dr. Strangelove nods (you heard me, Dr. Strangelove nods), I can’t possibly recommend it enough. And for those who don’t, well, I’ll tell you when to cover your eyes.

Grade: A. Rated R. Now playing at Regal Biltmore Grande

(Photo: Freezing Point Oy/Antti Rastivo)