Sisu

The Alchemy of Blood and Gold

Lately I've found myself wanting something very basic from action movies: weight. Too many modern blockbusters feel airy, synthetic, and frictionless, all green-screen gods throwing digital force at each other until your eyes go numb. Then *Sisu* shows up, caked in mud and spite, and suddenly you remember how satisfying gravity can be. Jalmari Helander's film is built out of dirt, blood, metal, and one man's absolute refusal to stay dead.

Set in the bombed-out emptiness of Finnish Lapland near the end of 1944, the movie opens with a kind of deceptive calm. A prospector named Aatami (Jorma Tommila) digs for gold. That's the setup. For quite a while, hardly anybody speaks. We just watch the hard, repetitive work: the shovel, the pan, the horse, the terrier, the ache in his back. When he finally finds a rich seam of gold nuggets, the movie makes you feel every ounce of what it will cost to carry them out.



Naturally, an old man with a sack of gold crossing a war zone is asking for trouble. Trouble arrives as a scorched-earth Wehrmacht unit led by the blank-eyed SS officer Bruno (Aksel Hennie). They see an easy mark. What they do not know—and what the film happily doles out over its very lean 91 minutes—is that Aatami is not just some prospector. He is a legendary former commando who moves through the story like a folk tale that learned how to kill.

*The AU Review*’s Peter Gray got close when he called the movie "an amalgamation of Sergio Leone by way of *First Blood* and *Mad Max*." Even that undersells how specific Helander's wavelength is here. He wrote the script during the pandemic lockdowns, reportedly out of frustration with feeling trapped and creatively stalled, and that trapped fury seems to leak out of every scene. This is not a reflective World War II drama interested in moral complexity. It is a revenge fable with grease under its nails, built around the pleasure of watching a man dismantle fascists with whatever brutal tool is within reach.



What keeps the movie from floating into pure cartoon is Tommila. He gives Aatami a bodily reality that makes the nonsense feel almost earned. He speaks only eleven words in the whole film, which is plenty, because the character is written all over his frame. When he strips down to bathe in the lake, his torso looks like a historical record. Bullet wounds, scars, torn tissue—his skin tells you everything. Tommila, who is Helander's brother-in-law, walks like a man who has already lived too long and finds this latest attempt on his life more irritating than alarming.

And the movie really does throw everything at him. He is shot, blown up, hanged, hunted across minefields. The breaking point between brutal war movie and deadpan live-action cartoon arrives in the lake sequence, which I have not stopped thinking about. Aatami is hiding underwater while soldiers fire into the water from shore. He is running out of air. One Nazi dives in after him. Aatami kills the man, slices open his throat beneath the surface, and then breathes in the escaping oxygen from the wound.

It's ridiculous. (I'm pretty sure biology doesn't work that way.) But the scene is played with such pitiless commitment that I ended up grinning anyway.



Whether any of this works for you will depend almost entirely on your appetite for pulpy excess. I did start to lose some faith in the third act. The heavy, practical grime of the first hour gives way to an airborne finish involving a transport plane that feels a little too digital and a little too airy by comparison. Once Aatami is clinging to the outside of an aircraft in flight, the danger starts to feel less human and more like a mechanism.

Even so, I can't stay annoyed at it for long. The opening card explains that "sisu" is an untranslatable Finnish idea: a kind of white-knuckle resolve that only emerges when hope is already gone. Helander takes that idea and literalizes it into a compact slaughter machine. The movie has no interest in unpacking the ethics of war. It points the camera at one tired, furious man and lets him refuse to stop. Sometimes that is exactly enough.