‘Sisu’: Toronto Review

Dir/scr: Jalmari Helander. Finland. 2022. 91mins

Writer/director Jalmari Helander (fantasy Christmas horror Rare Exports, 2012) is back with a bang with this dark and ultra-violent survival chiller about a lone army sergeant attempting to outrun a group of vicious Nazis in the Finnish wilderness. His last genre outing, 2014 action adventure Big Game, played TIFF’s Midnight Madness strand and now Sisu follows suit: what it lacks in historical or narrative nuance, it more than makes up for in outlandish, gory action.

An escalating orgy of extreme, fleshy violence in line with American actioners like ’Rambo’

Written by Helander after the Covid-19 pandemic put his planned next feature on hold, and produced by his longtime collaborator Petri Jokiranta of Subzero, Sisu could possibly look forward to further genre festival interest after its TIFF premiere. Certainly, Sony already has worldwide rights (apart from Nordic territories, where it’s with  Nordisk Film), and it also seems suited to a dedicated streaming platform. The fact that most of the (limited) dialogue is in English may also help Sisu travel.

Sisu’s premise is deliberately simple, despite the significance of its historical backdrop. It’s 1944, in the dying days of World War II, and Nazi officers have adopted a scorched earth policy as they are forced to withdraw from Finland. When a small platoon led by the steely-eyed Colonel Bruno (Aksel Hennie) comes across a lone man with a huge cache of gold, they decide to relieve him of his bounty by any means necessary.

What they hadn’t reckoned on, however, is that this taciturn, scarred man is former Finnish commander Aatami (a commanding, mostly-silent performance by Rare Exports star Jorma Comilla); a one-man killing machine known locally as ‘The Immortal’ and the visceral embodiment of the film’s title, a Finnish word which generally means “a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination.” He’ll certainly live up to that reputation over the film’s running time, as we witness him survive beatings, shootings, hangings, a minefield and a plane crash as the film stretches plausibility to its absolute limit.

But Helander is more concerned with shock over realism, eschewing any examination of the historical context or the psychological ravages of conflict in favour of an escalating orgy of extreme, fleshy violence in line with American actioners like Rambo and, particularly in those sequences involving tanks, the Mad Max franchise. (There are also echoes of Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian zombie Nazi Dead Snow franchise in the glee the film has in finding inventive ways to dispatch these cruelest of men.)

That Hollywood influence is also evident in the fact that, despite its very specific period setting, Helander has framed his film like a classic Western; the desolate Finnish tundra — the film shot for 35 days in the furthest reaches of Lapland — a counterpart to the lawless American wilds, Aatami the lone hero going up against the marauding hoards. Visually, it has the requisite expansive widescreen feel, cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos capturing the vastness of the landscape against which the extensive visual effects take on a touch of the fantastical uncanny. And it’s all propelled by Juri Seppa and Tuomas Wainola’s layered score, which combines the twang of strings with deep guttural vocals to give the film a depth that’s somewhat lacking in the narrative.