In deepest Lapland there’s a bearded old man who gives good gifts to all the nice children. And then there’s the other one. The one who gives a right old beating to all the bad Nazis.
It’s 1944 in the land of the Laps, and the Germans are making a ragbag retreat. A grizzled veteran of the Finnish army lives alone, prospecting for gold, a horse and dog for company. Pickaxing an unforgiving land, tragedy etched in his face, Aatami strikes it rich. But the road to the bank - and to hell - is paved with straggling Nazis. An old man’s gold seems an easy target. Ah.
“It’s not what you did, son” says the prescient villain in the first John Wick, “it’s who you did it to.” Apt, that. Sisu’s Aatami is also a dog-loving loner, grieving a loss, reluctantly recalled to a vendetta of violence. But this killer is conjured from the landscape and lore of Lapland. He’s an embodiment of the national spirit, born from the brooding power of geology.
‘Sisu’, a woman tells her Nazi captors, is a Finnish word meaning ‘the spirit of never giving up, however hard it gets’. And hard it certainly gets. Aatami dishes it out. A knife to the brain, a landmine to the skull. But he takes it too – blown up, shot, burned, hanged. An unstoppable force of nature.
Enormous skies, rock-strewn lands, Sisu is a richly elemental film, ravishingly shot. No accident that our hero battles the enemy in earth, air, fire and water. The antagonists are creatures of metal, wheel and gun - man-made and man-flawed. Armed with his trusty pick and knife, Aatami turns the tables, using the baddies’ weapons against them.
On the surface, Sisu is a mash-up of the 70s novels of Sven Hassel and the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, with Tarantino’s penchant for intertitles - 'Kill ‘em all' being one. There’s a superhero vibe too, but it’s rooted in the soil of Finland; believable, earthed.
The trailer pitches it as a B-movie schlocker – and sure, there’s plenty of limb lopping. But it’s way more poetic than that. The cinematography creates the feel of clothing, rock, metal, wound and water. Unlike John Wick’s artificial netherland, it’s a material world.
It’s funny too. The violence is as much Tom and Jerry as it is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. See it alongside Netflix’s Blood and Gold, and you’ll spot the difference. There too retreating Nazis seek some gold. But it’s a Franken-movie, knowingly stitched together from well-worn tropes. Sisu brings something new – a visual and poetic power.
And it’s certainly a blast. Blistering and beautiful, it’s an upbeat beat-em-up. Largely wordless, and mostly in English, it’s a masterclass of show-not-tell. And while it deliberately invites the comparison with spaghetti westerns, it’s a warmer watch than that - in spite of the Lapland setting.