Sisu
Director: Jalmari Helander
Writer: Jalmari Helander
Cast: Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo, Onni Tommila
Seen on: 24.7.2025

Content Note: rape, animal death

Plot:
Aatami (Jorma Tommila) wanted to leave war behind and make his fortune. So he withdrew to Lapland to search for gold. But just as he – literally – hits the mother lode, the Nazis arrive in Lappland. To get his gold to safety, Aatami needs to find a way through them and the minefield they made out of Lapland.

Sisu was part of a SLASH Filmfestival I had to miss, but I am glad to have caught up with it now, although I think it would have worked better to see it with a crowd. Still, there is entertainment to be had, even if the film didn’t blow me away.

Sisu works entirely with generic characters: Aatami is the hero of few words with a tragic backstory (he has a dead wife and child, of course) and magical levels of violence and survival in him. The villainous SS officer Bruno (Aksel Hennie) is evil, evil, and also evil. The few (surprisingly clean, given the dirt on everybody else) women we get to see are the usual rape revenge cyphers: victims until given a chance to show pure rage. The dog (possibly a Bedlington Terrier, btw) is cute, brave and loyal.

These characters are only drawn up enough to make the film’s narrative framework hold up, so that it can use said framework to do what it really wants to do, and that is: to kill fucking Nazis in bloody, gruesome and sometimes pretty creative ways. There are definitely things when it comes to the gore that I haven’t seen before (contrary to the characters we have all seen before) and that were partly pretty jawdropping.

Particularly because the gore is the point of the film, I think that this would have been more fun in a crowd than watching it at home where the humorous part of everything (and there even are some outright jokes here) just don’t come out as well. Humor is just such a social experience for the most part. Without a crowd around me, I would have liked a little more substance to the film.

I do have to say that with the consistent right-wing shift we have seen in politics in recent years, nazi killing films have ironically lost some of their draw to me. The evil we see here just isn’t distant enough anymore to really enjoy it. Even if it is a film about killing evil and resisting it until the last breath, and then some. Yet another reason to hate fascist fuckers.

Summarizing: fun enough but a little too flippant.