Sisu

Sisu (2022) is set in the autumn of 1944 during the Lapland War. Finland is no longer allied with Germany, and retreating German units are burning everything behind them. In that emptied landscape an old man finds gold, and a German patrol decides to take it. They pick the wrong man. Jorma Tommila plays Aatami Korpi and barely speaks. His past is in the Winter War; that is all the film tells you, and it is enough. The title is an untranslatable Finnish word. Sisu describes a kind of stubbornness that removes giving up from the list of options, closer to endurance than to heroism. Jalmari Helander made Rare Exports and Big Game before this. Sisu was shot in 2021 in Lapland, near the village of Nuorgam, on a budget of about six million euros. It grossed 14.3 million dollars worldwide and became the highest earning Finnish film at the American box office. It runs 91 minutes. Good for: near wordless action, revenge in a western register, and staging built out of snow and mud. Less good for: the violence is extreme and graphic. There is no character depth, the plot is a sequence of kills, and the film makes no attempt to pretend otherwise.