by Hudson Moura
Helander opens with a definition card—“Sisu is a Finnish word that cannot be translated… a white-knuckle form of courage and unimaginable determination”—and then proceeds to film that definition with pulp clarity. Set in Lapland, 1944, as World War II dies hard, the story unfolds in chapter headings—“The Gold,” “The Nazis,” “The Minefield,” “The Legend,” “Scorched Earth”—that signal a fable’s inevitability rather than a realist chronicle. Aatami (Jorma Tommila), a taciturn ex-soldier turned prospector, pulls massive gold nuggets from a river and heads for town; a retreating Nazi detachment discovers his haul and chooses the worst mistake of their war: they try to take it.
What follows is a lean, swaggering collision of spaghetti-western antiheroics and grindhouse ingenuity—the kind of high-concept, low-dialogue carnage that would make Tarantino and Sam Raimi grin. The film’s chapter architecture parcels out set-pieces with metronomic assurance: a minefield sequence staged like a lethal puzzle; roadside ambushes cut for punchline brutality; a late-film ascent into near-myth where “the immortal” moniker the Russians gave Aatami begins to look like reportage. The geography matters: Helander frames Lapland’s tundra like a northern desert—bleached horizons, wind-scoured flats—so violence reads as ritual against an elemental backdrop.
Tommila is terrific, playing Aatami as weathered resolve rather than quip machine; every movement is a cost/benefit calculation, every kill a craft solution. He evokes the ’80s survival titans—a Bruce Willis or Schwarzenegger stripped of banter—while remaining distinctly Finnish in his stoicism. The ensemble around him clicks into archetype without deadening: sneering officers, nervy subordinates, civilians who understand that neutrality has an expiration date. Crucially, the film refuses cynicism toward resistance; it believes in the moral clarity of refusing to yield to fascists, even as it stylizes the refusal into comic-book ferocity.
Formally, Sisu is exacting. The practical effects are deliciously tactile—blood, dust, twisted metal—augmented by savvy digital assists that keep the physics crunchy even when plausibility tilts toward legend. The soundtrack drives momentum without smothering it: percussive cues and droning textures that make engines growl and detonation beats land like rimshots. Helander’s camera favors legible framing and decisive cuts; each action beat is a design problem with a clear solution, and the edit respects the audience’s spatial intelligence.
If there’s a critique, it is intrinsic to the film’s program: characterization beyond Aatami is sketched rather than excavated, and the escalation occasionally courts cartoon invulnerability–which also makes turns to be a great plus to the film. Yet those choices are coherent with the project—a myth of endurance told in pulp grammar. The film promises sisu and delivers it, repeatedly, with inventive cruelty and a streak of black comedy. A compact, brutally elegant war-western-horror-fantasy that films an untranslatable concept in frames you won’t forget. Rating: 5/5
Presented at Toronto After Dark Film Festival