Cult films aren’t deliberately made—they’re spontaneously created by word-of-mouth, their outrageousness, absurdity and all-around badassery spread far and wide by fans who’ve discovered their awesomeness and are eager to share it with others. Let me, then, join the swelling chorus heralding the arrival of a new movie destined to assume a place in the pantheon of delirious modern genre favorites: Sisu, a balls-to-the-wall Nazi-killing affair that more than lives up to the hype.
In theaters now, Sisu is an English-language WWII grindhouser from Finnish writer/director Jalmari Helander, who’s best known stateside for his demented 2010 Yuletide action-horror fable Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Imbued with the same gonzo verve as that holiday saga, Helander’s latest tells its story with compact concision, even as it also indulges in great gooey gobs of over-the-top mayhem.
Wasting not a second on extraneous plot details or superfluous exposition, it’s a lean, mean machine designed only to provide the pleasure of seeing SS soldiers get slaughtered at the hands of an unstoppable hero with a grudge a mile wide and an unwillingness to die at the hands of his enemies. The result is a bloodbath of lunatic extremeness, as expertly staged as its recurring sights of Nazis meeting their deserved demise is satisfying.
Its title an untranslatable Finnish term that refers to “a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination” that “manifests itself when all hope is lost,” Sisu is a meat-and-potatoes-style massacre indebted to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns (most notably, via chapter cards featuring Ennio Morricone-ish punctuation) and John Wick, with a bit of Mad Max: Fury Road thrown in for maniacal good measure.
It concerns Aatami (Jorma Tommila), a Finnish loner mining for gold out in the middle of barren-wasteland nowhere, although to refer to him by his name is inherently misleading, since he’s less a man than a mythic specter—a Gollum sculpted by war and loss into a righteous avenger. So fearsome is Aatami that he’s actually known as Koschei, a figure from Russian folklore whose moniker means “The Immortal.”
Aatami’s legendary reputation posits him as a kindred spirit to Keanu Reeves’ boogeyman assassin, if one with even less to say. Sisu is a movie of few words because it has more than enough screaming, grunting, and gurgling to suffice, and key to its set-up’s effectiveness is Helander’s succinct show-don’t-tell storytelling.
Introductory narration sets the scene as 1944 Finland, where Nazis are beating a scorched-Earth retreat, and then locates its center of attention, Aatami, at a remote patch of broken Earth, sifting for gold. When he unearths it, he intensifies his digging, ultimately striking upon a bountiful treasure. Once collected, he sets off on his horse with his fluffy dog in tow, determined to reap the rewards of his find.
The peacefulness of his journey, however, is ruined when he passes by a convoy of Nazis led by commander Bruno (Aksel Hennie), who along with his deviant right-hand sniper Wolf (Jack Doolan)—a cretin introduced shirtless and seemingly buttoning up his pants while exiting a truck full of female captives—glowers and sneers at him. Allowing him to pass because they know comrades down the road will take care of him, Bruno, Wolf, and their genocidal mates are soon forced to take active maneuvers once they deduce (from the sound of gunfire) that Aatami hasn’t easily died. For their meddling, they get more than they bargained for—and then some.
There’s no question about what comes next with Sisu, only how it’ll play out. Helander continually finds new means of upping the ante, be it Aatami having to battle a dozen adversaries in an environment that provides him with no cover and few combat options, his navigation of a minefield that renders his every step his potential last, or an airborne finale that boasts a feat of ridiculously satisfying action-man insanity.
There’s no rest for the wicked, or Aatami, or the film itself, which barrels from one perilous scenario to the next, each one situating its hero in seemingly impossible circumstances from which he must—and does—escape through perseverance and pain. Helander knows that the thrill is in these encounter’s inventiveness, and he rarely fails to come up with a goofy and/or jaw-dropping means of keeping things demented.
Because, like its protagonist, Sisu doesn’t know how to stop, it eventually casts Aatami in veritable Christ-like terms: first with a shot of him in a hole with arms outstretched; then via a gash in his side and an act of pseudo-self-crucifixion; and finally with a figurative resurrection.
This is par for the material’s mad course, and handled with just the right amount of suggestion; as with the link between Aatami’s gold (which the Nazis covet as a means of fleeing to safety) and his similarly hued wedding band (a reminder of the wife and family he lost in the war), Helander conveys everything through clipped visual means. Sisu is, formally speaking, an economical adventure, even though it never feels restrained—from its slow-motion strutting to its dismembered-corpse gore, it delivers the genre goods with gusto.
Retribution is sought not only by Aatami but, also, by a group of women who are held prisoner by Bruno and his Third Reich colleagues, and who—led by fearsome Aino (Mimosa Willamo)—are empowered by Koschei to wreak bloody vengeance on their oppressors. Helander knows that the only thing more satisfying than watching rapey murderers get stabbed, shot and blown to kingdom come is watching rapey murderous Nazis scum suffer those fates, and he makes sure to indulge in images of cocky, heartless, snickering goose-steppers receiving their just desserts.
This is B-movie pulp that’s timely only in the sense that Nazis are forever detestable and always worth eliminating with extreme prejudice, and Tommila—a ferociously grimacing presence whose Aatami has a body full of Frankensteinian scars and eyes that can bore a hole through your soul—proves an ideal vehicle for carrying out such duties.
Sisu won’t conquer the box office nor will it garner any year-end awards, and yet it’s precisely the sort of early-summer film that the season was made for, dispensing unrepentant carnage with a healthy dose of anti-Nazi fervor. Consequently, whether it’s a mainstream hit or not, cult status seems guaranteed—and warranted.
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