You May Have Missed: Sisu (Dir Jalmari Helander, 1h21m, 2023).

Original Finnish poster for Sisu

Welcome to 2024, and to the seventh year of my blog. As with January 2023 (reviews here), I start this year by looking back at the old, from first-time directors tackling lost loves regained, to a towering biopic of the father of the Atom Bomb, to a portrait of an inhospitable people and place through the eyes-and lens-of an outsider priest. We start, in 1944, with a satchel full of gold, a platoon of Nazis, and the best action of 2023 as a battle-hardened Finnish soldier turned gold miner intends to protect his gold strike from a fleeing SS squad in Jalmari Helander's Sisu: a brutal and exciting homage to classic action cinema. 

This film marks the culmination of an innovative era for Finnish cinema, and a long way from its wilderness years of the early to mid 1990s. The last three years have brought both critical acclaim, with Compartment No. 6 (2021) winning the Palme D'Or, and cult success, Hanna Bergholm's starkly beautiful creature-feature Hatching (2022) becoming a new horror classic. Helander, for his part, is not entirely a stranger to this blog: I previously covered his enjoyably offbeat Rare Exports: A Christmas Story (2010) in December 2020, and it's rather rewarding that, a decade and change on, with 2014's enjoyably undemanding "The President has Gone Missing in the Finnish Wilderness" action flick Big Game, also in the can, Helander returns to his native Finland, with Tommila Sr and Jr in tow, to make another superb slice of Finnish cinema.

Aatami (Jorma Tommila), attempts to escape his pursuers

The story: it's 1944, and the German army is fleeing north Finland en route to Norway. At this point we meet Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila, the star of Rare Exports), a widowed miner, who now prospects for gold in the high Finnish wilderness. In a film that contains practically no dialogue-Aatami speaks only once in the film- it is nigh constant action, rather than dialogue that tells our tale. This introduction is laden in visual exposition. Aatami is a man with history, the camera revealing, rather than telling us about his past, his body covered in battle scars as he washes in a stream, whilst his physical presence, as he stumbles across a vein of gold in the wilderness, has a quiet dignity, Tommila imbuing the miner with a toughness, but an undeniable warmth as he digs up his new found riches alongside his dog. This peace is not to last, however, as rolling into view comes a column of SS troops.

This unit is led by Helldorf (Aksel Hennie), a sadistic figure who, together with his second in command, the boorish Wolf (Jack Doolan), who is introduced stepping out of a truck containing female Finnish captives, are brutish, cruel and immediately apparent as our villains. They are uncomplicated adversaries, travelling atop a Panzer tank for much of the film, and, from beginning to end, their depiction makes no attempt to present any of its Nazi soldiers as anything other than brutes and violent thugs. However, Aatami is allowed to pass Helldorf's column, but quickly comes face to face with another platoon of Nazis, who threaten him with execution, and attempt to steal the gold he is now laden down with, and it is here that the film's violent streak, its gleeful bloodletting and Peckinpahish-cum-Tarantinoesque executions of the German soldiery, pops into view, as, turning, Aatami buries his hunting knife in the head of the soldier accosting him.

Helldorf (Aksel Hennie, right) and Wolf (Jack Doonan, left), give chase

This is followed by the opening salvo of several well-choreographed, leisurely framed, and undeniably gripping action scenes, the grizzled old man proceeding to systematically massacre the unit in brutal fashion, with legs broken, blood spattered, and brutal, well-shot fights beginning to belie the true nature of Aatami's past. This attracts the attention of Helldorf, who turns his column around and heads after the miner, soon chasing him into a minefield under fire, where in another spectacular effects shot, the horse is blown from under him, and he sprawls in the dirt, the gold scattered around him. The Germans close in, as he gathers up the gold, a brief respite, only to spring back into action, Aatami using the landmines to make his escape, gold back in hand. Helldorf's unit's attempts to follow thwarted by the hapless soldiery as landmines are thrown, and stepped upon.

With the identity of Aatami, as a nigh mythical commando in the brutal Russo-Finnish war revealed, together with an almost impossible kill-count to his name, and a fearsome reputation, so Helldorf resolves to kill Aatami and take the gold, to ensure at least his survival. So begins a brutal chase, Aatami barely ever more than a step in front of his pursuers, the tank and trucks, and the soldiers who commandeer them often looming over him, a single man against this manifestation of a dying, but still utterly evil regime. The bodies may pile up-there's a particularly visceral, but stunningly effective sequence in which Aatami, pursued into a lake, slits two men's throats to breathe their last gasp of air-but the relentless pace of the film, and the pursuit never truly allows Aatami, or indeed the audience to rest. We, and he, arrive at the final act bruised and bloodied, and his-and his fellow Finns' revenge upon the men who seek his hard-won gold is as visceral as it is cathartic. And oh boy, is it cathartic.

Sisu: A film of grit, blood, gold, determination and dead Nazis

It's perhaps easy to consider Sisu as a coat-tail rider, an exciting, if  not ultra-violent pastiche of American action movies of yesterday-the brutally effective knifework, and equally bloody grit of Sisu beholden to First Blood (dir. Ted Kotcheff, 1982), Aatami an older, grimmer John Rambo for a more violent age, a nigh-mute figure bent on his own survival, only regaining a little of his humanity after arming his countrywomen with the ability to get revenge on their own terms, but otherwise a nigh-revenant figure stalking the Finnish landscape. One can also consider Sisu a Finnish answer to Keanu Reeves' John Wick, the steady cinematography of Kjell Lagerroos, and stunt choreographer Oula Kitti giving the film a similar grounded heft, a weight behind every punch, shot, and stab, and, like Mr Wick, Aatami seems bound for serial adventures.

This is to somewhat miss the point of Sisu-the film's sensibility is neither truly that of a mainstream Hollywood action flick of yesteryear, despite the retro titling and the occasional sense that one is in a stealth remake of Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron (1977), from which the figures of Helldorf and Wolf seem to have been plucked wholesale, nor does its sensibilities lie close to the ultraslick bullet ballet of Wick and his many imitators. This is an undeniably Finnish film, a success story from a deserved box office success, and a prime example of success from Nordic cinema, in a film that, in its depiction of a lone man's battle for survival and wealth beyond dream, against the might of a crumbling Nazi Germany, is proof of as much grit and determination in its production and success in cinemas, as its seemingly unstoppable hero.

Rating: Highly Recommended. 

Sisu is available to watch online in the UK via Amazon Prime, and on DVD from Sony Pictures. It is also currently available to stream via Apple TV, and on DVD from ‎ Lionsgate Home Entertainment in the USA.

Next week, we turn to a childhood friendship rekindled in the form of Celine Song's directoral debut, Past Lives.

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