In Sisu, a lone fighter takes on legions of Nazis, finding ever-inventive – and grisly – ways to annihilate them. We talk to those responsible about the year’s most outrageous war movie.
Read an extract of our exclusive Sisu feature from our Summer 2023 issue below, or see the full piece here.
When Sisu begins, we are told there is a word in the Finnish language that cannot be neatly translated into one in English: we need a whole bunch of them. “Sisu” describes a white-knuckled form of courage and determination; an internal resistance that rises when all hope is lost. But even that doesn’t fully cover it. “Sisu” is as intrinsic to Finnish culture as sauna and salt liquorice, and we need something more, maybe like a 90-minute film, to serve as a dictionary definition. Conveniently, this is what writer and director Jelmari Helander has made us, in the form of a non-stop wild and crazy action ride about a gnarly old guy who simply refuses to die.
Sisu is set in 1944, when the Nazis were in retreat from northern Finland. They were operating a scorched-earth policy on their way out: destroying all roads, bridges, villages and towns as they went. Somewhere out there in the wilderness, lone prospector Aatami (Jorma Tommila) strikes a huge vein of gold in the earth. All he has to do is dig it up, load it onto the back of his horse, and take it to the bank a mere 563 miles away and he’s a rich man. But between here and the bank are Nazis — led by the purely evil Bruno (Aksel Hennie) with his sleazy sidekick Wolf (Jack Doolan), hauling a truck full of captured Finnish women — who decide that Aatami’s gold will play a big part of their post-war lives. What they don’t know is that this old Finnish gold digger is a legendary ex-commando, soon to become a one-man death-squad, who will stop at nothing — like, really nothing — to get to the bank with his bag of gold intact.
For a genre already full of elaborate Nazi deaths, it is no small thing to say that there are kills here of a kind you have never seen before. There are splattery landmine explosions and flying, identifiable limbs that set off other splattery landmine explosions. There is a man-to-man battle atop a moving Nazi tank filmed on an actual moving one in Lapland. There is also a knife-fight in a river that we’re not even sure is physically possible but might be the best bit. “When I wrote that scene I was laughing my ass off,” Helander tells Empire. Every day, he worried he would run out of inventive ways to kill Nazis. What we’re saying is, there probably won’t be a sequel: he’s put them all in this one.
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