Sisu: Road to Revenge

The Burden of Home

In the lexicon of war cinema, "home" is typically a static ideal—a sepia-toned memory a soldier keeps folded in a pocket, or a ruin he returns to weep over. It is rarely a physical burden he straps to a truck bed and drives through a minefield. Jalmari Helander’s *Sisu: Road to Revenge* (2025) takes the metaphorical weight of displacement and makes it absurdly, violently literal. If the first *Sisu* was a survivalist western about a man who refused to die, this sequel is a mythological road movie about a man who refuses to let his history be erased.

Set in 1946, amidst the geopolitical friction of a Finland forced to cede territory to the Soviets, the film finds the legendary commando Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) not seeking a fight, but seeking a relocation. Returning to the Karelian homestead where his family was slaughtered, he does not burn it down in a fit of nihilism. Instead, he dismantles it, plank by plank. He loads the bones of his past onto a groaning transport truck, determined to replant his life in safe soil. It is a premise of Sisyphusian absurdity that Helander treats with stone-faced reverence.

Visually, Helander has evolved from the grindhouse grit of the first film into something more operatic and kinetic—a style one might call "Buster Keaton by way of George Miller." The dialogue is sparse to the point of non-existence, forcing the visual language to do the heavy lifting. The camera worships the mechanics of survival: the torque of a struggling engine, the splintering of timber, and the grotesque physics of the human body meeting Soviet steel. The action sequences are not just fights; they are slapstick routines from hell. In one standout sequence involving a swooping airplane and a payload of lumber, the film achieves a level of spatial ingenuity that makes modern CGI-fests look lethargic. The violence is exorbitant, yes, but it possesses a tactile crunch that grounds the madness.

At the center of this hurricane remains Jorma Tommila, a performer whose face is a landscape of deep fissures and granite resolve. Tommila understands that Aatami Korpi is not a "character" in the modern sense, with an arc of learning to love again. He is an elemental force, a golem animated by grief. His silence is not a cool affectation; it is the silence of a man for whom words lost their utility years ago. When he faces off against Igor Draganov—played with reptilian menace by Stephen Lang—it isn't a clash of ideologies, but a collision between a man who destroys and a man who builds. Lang, chewing the scenery with relish, provides the necessary loquacious evil to balance Tommila’s mute fury.

Critics often dismiss sequels as cash grabs, and "Road to Revenge" certainly indulges in the "bigger, louder" trope. However, it sidesteps the fatigue of franchise-building by anchoring its carnage in a surprisingly tender metaphor. The sight of that truck, swaying precariously under the weight of a dismantled house, is a potent image of the refugee experience. We carry our homes with us, the film suggests, even when the world tries to blow them off the road.

*Sisu: Road to Revenge* succeeds because it understands that while destruction is cinematic, reconstruction is heroic. It is a film that begins with a man taking a house apart and ends with the hope that he might, finally, put it back together. It is a bloody, diesel-soaked parable about the weight of memory, proving that sometimes the heaviest thing a soldier carries isn't his weapon, but his wood.