Sisu: a brutal, pulpy and enjoyably ludicrous Finnish war movie

Sisu takes place in a familiar movie universe in which German soldiers speak to each other in English and the grizzled hero says almost nothing at all. The film’s title, however, cannot easily be translated for an international audience. What the Finnish word connotes is ‘a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination,’ a quality that manifests ‘when all hope is lost’. The definition’s lurid phrasing is suggestive of an alternate history for Jalmari Helander’s satisfyingly grisly action thriller. Surely in some other dimension, the story of Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), a former soldier turned gold-hunter who will stop at nothing to protect his bounty from the Nazis, exists as a pulp novel sitting on a rack in a Helsinki bus station circa 1958, back when memories of the war were not as faint as they may be for Sisu’s viewers.

Conversely, it’s easy to imagine this as a Nordic answer to the punchy brand of WWII thriller that emerged in the 70s, when the spaghetti-western templates of Sergios Leone and Corbucci were applied to tales of Nazi savagery and Allied vengeance. Of course, genre aficionados may just see a whole lot of Inglourious Basterds in Sisu’s onscreen violence, which includes mine explosions that send body parts in all directions and hapless enemy troops deployed as bullet-ridden human shields.

That said, Sisu has enough brio to rise above the current standards of similarly Tarantino-indebted fare. Moving briskly from one burly set piece to the next, it’s equipped with a bracing sense of economy and drive – Helander’s preferred mode for mayhem proves as brutal and relentless as his protagonist. Convincing even in the film’s most ludicrous moments, Tommila invests proceedings with the same stony gravitas he conveyed as the Santa Claus hunter in Rare Exports (2010), Helander’s enjoyably gruesome feature debut. Tommila’s hard-nosed sensibility as Aatami is well-complemented by Mimosa Willamo as Aino, a female captive who’s increasingly emboldened by Aatami’s rising kill count.

For all the pleasure viewers may take in the sight of nameless Nazis being dispatched and dismembered, they may be surprised by the film’s solemnity, too. Helander takes pains to root his revenge fantasy in his country’s harrowing experiences at the hands of both German and Soviet forces. The worst of the suffering may be suggested by the presence of Aino and the other captives sitting stone-faced in one of the German convoy’s trucks. And while there are perhaps questions to be asked about raising the spectre of wartime sexual violence within the neo-B movie context that Helander embraces, at least Sisu’s creator makes sure there’s plenty of payback to go around.

 ► Sisu arrives in UK cinemas 26 May.