He was once a man of war. His body is covered in scars to prove that he fought bravely for his country of Finland. But then something broke inside him. And now? Well, now he has removed himself from combat.
That war still rages. It’s the last days of World War II, and the Allies are slowly pushing the Nazis out of Finland, leaving a wide stretch of scorched earth behind them. But Aatami Korpi is no longer a part of that battle. He is simply a man mining for gold: far from civilization, far from people, far from war.
Then, however, the unexpected happens: He finds what he’s been looking for. Aatami discovers a vein of the precious metal that’s as long as he is tall. And suddenly the slightly crazy and thoroughly filth-covered man is very wealthy. All he has to do is cart his treasure back to what’s left of the world, and he will have more money than he could have ever dreamed.
There is but one problem.
While riding his heavily burdened horse back toward the nearest city, Aatami crosses paths with a small troop of Nazi soldiers heading the opposite direction. It didn’t have to be a problem. The weary soldiers could have kept going. They could have ignored a shaggy, dirty, older man on a swayback horse. But they didn’t. They decided to stop him, to drive him to his knees and steal whatever he might have.
There is a Finnish word, sisu, that cannot be easily translated into English. But it means, roughly, a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination that manifests itself when all hope is lost.
When the sneering, violent Nazis jammed a gun barrel into the back of an old man’s neck, little did they realize they were giving him exactly what he needed. While crushing him down they brought back all the hatred and all the rage that once flooded his very being. They spurred his muscle memory for killing.
Those foul Nazis unleashed … sisu!
You could say that Aatami’s fight against the German soldiers is a good thing. The soldiers are brutal men. And they are transporting some six Finnish women whom they had kidnapped and repeatedly raped. Aatami eventually sets those women free and gives them the means to claim revenge. But Aatami’s “righteous” actions are also very, very bloody ones.
None.
Aatami stands naked in a stream to wash his grime-covered body. We see him fully from the rear, his unclothed body covered in scars. Later, we see a group of tattered women huddled in a German truck and find out that the soldiers have kept the kidnapped women to use as sexual slaves.
We don’t see any of the suggested and (apparently) repeated rapes of the women mentioned above. But we do see a shirtless soldier climbing out of the truck after being with them. A different soldier sneeringly spreads one of the women’s legs, before being interrupted.
[Spoiler Warning] We find out that Aatami was no ordinary soldier. He was a decorated commander who snapped mentally when Russian soldiers murdered his wife. He then became a “ruthless, one-man death squad” that the Finnish army allowed to do pretty much whatever he desired. He wandered the battle area alone, butchering enemy combatants as he went.
And that’s exactly what happens again after the Germans beat him and drive him to his knees. We see Aatami kill Nazis in scores of brutal ways: He drives a large blade through a soldier’s temple; he repeatedly stabs foes in the torso and neck; he hits a soldier in the head with a landmine (completely obliterating him in slow motion).
Soldiers step on landmines and get blown to chunks (body parts, again, flying in slow motion). We see corpses that have been crisped and seared from fiery explosions, as well as dead soldiers who were shot in the face and forehead. Men underwater have their throats stabbed and the air sucked out of their bubbling, slashed-open necks. Several men get run over by tank treads that leave them crushed to pulp. And, of course, soldiers are riddled with bullets as well as beaten with heavy objects, with blood-gushing results.
Aatami was nicknamed “The Immortal” during his active duty in the military, and we see why: He will not stop or give up, no matter the agony. We see him shot and digging bullets out of his own flesh with the point of a knife. He stiches together gaping, gory wounds with a twisted sliver of metal and some wire. He’s hung by the neck, set on fire, battered about the face with a large metal buckle, hit by the force of a thrown grenade and slashed with a blade. His horse also steps on a landmine—blowing the animal into a bloody mist of bones and guts. Not only does blood continually seep from Aatami’s wounds, but there are large slashes on his face (some wounds he stanches by packing them with dirt).
Soldiers use high-caliber automatic weapons and cannon shells to mow others down and rip up vehicles. A man is strapped to a bomb that falls to the ground and explodes upon impact. Aatami is the sole living passenger in a cargo plane that crashes nose-first into the ground. Etc.
There is very little dialogue here. But what little we hear is littered with crudities that include more than a dozen f-words and multiple uses of “h—,” “a–” and “d–n.” There’s one exclamation of “son of a b–ch!”
The Germans have a “crate full of booze” that we see at least one soldier drinking from.
One guy urinates as the camera watches him (from the waist up).
We live in a world filled with various shades of gray. And our movies tend to reflect those elusive perspectives about what’s good or evil, what’s right or wrong.
SISU isn’t that kind of film.
Created by a Finnish writer/director on a tiny budget (compared to most American productions, anyway) SISU doesn’t have even the slightest shade of nuance. It knows exactly where it wants to draw the line, where to plant its flag.
You could say this movie is Tarantino-like, or a tale that’s Rambo-ish, but neither of those comparisons fully work for this bit of modern grindhouse fiction.
The dialogue here is pruned back to its crudest nubbins. (The one-man death-squad protagonist, for example, has exactly one sentence to deliver.) The movie’s kill-all-the-tormentors storyline is indefatigably unwavering. It’s carnival of carnage, ripped open flesh and torment is brazenly unapologetic. And it’s all wrapped up in a polished, subtext-free package.
SISU simply aspires to be the raw and raucous entertainment choice for any group of rowdy moviegoers that wants to witness clearly defined bad guys being bloodily blotted out.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
