Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sisu’ on VOD, a Gruesomely Violent B-Movie That Feeds Nazis to the Grinder

Sisu (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is like John Wick if John Wick was older, grayer, Finnish and lived during World War II. I mean, both Wick and Sisu protagonist Aatami Korpi have pet dogs and are highly trained assassins who are very good at separating people from the blood they need to keep living. They also have sisu, a Finnish word that roughly translates to a combination of stoicism, grit and tenacity; sisu is something required of one who stares in the faces of many shithead Nazis and kills them until they are not breathing or dead, whichever comes first. It might take a little sisu to get through the movie, too, since it’s pretty violent – and notable for being written and directed by Rare Exports filmmaker Jalmari Helander – but at least it’s about half the length of the last Wick flick.

SISU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: FINLAND, 1944. The Nazis just effed with the wrong mofo. At first, they let Aatami (Jorma Tommila) wander by unmolested, since he’s a grizzled graybeard who looks like he smells like really gross feet crossed with a mungy old dog. Isn’t it just like arrogant Nazis to not hassle and/or assault an old man, or kill him just for the hell of it, and simply consider him a lesser citizen unworthy of significant human interaction? He’s spent god-knows-how-long getting very dirty while digging a hole in the gorgeous patchwork fields of Lapland, where he found, oh, not much, just a massive f—ing vein of gold that’s gonna make him rich, rich, RICH! It’s all in his saddlebags. And then it turns out the Nazis were just gonna let him step on one of the landmines they buried, and sure enough, boom, Aatami’s horse is BBQ, but our man’s only got bumps and bruises. Such is the baseline for suspension of disbelief in this film; please prepare yourself accordingly.

The Nazis have a trike and a tank and a couple of trucks, one of which has captive women in the back, the implication being that the former have done terrible things to the latter. Now, this isn’t the type of movie where there’s a head Nazi somewhere with a meticulous haircut and boots so shiny they reflect his asshole face back at him. No, the Nazis were losing the war by this point, so patrols like the one led by Bruno (Aksel Hennie) here – who purses his lips like a super-extra-ultra-Aryan Owen Wilson – are scorching the earth and hanging the citizenry with no goal save for a quick dispatch to Hell once they’re dead. Everyone in this movie has a dirty face and torn clothes and looks weary and exhausted and in need of a nap and maybe a piece of bread that isn’t stale and moldy. It’s just misery misery everywhere misery. 

Anyway, Aatami’s got sisu, which one character describes as simply “refusing to die.” (All together now: IF ONLY IT WERE SO SIMPLE.) That might explain how he survived the landmine incident. One of the Nazis doesn’t fare so well in a related landmine incident, since Aatami picked one up and threw it at his head, rendering him a very loose collection of giblets, pork chops, tripe, bone, toenails and other assorted chunks of viscera. And our guy is just getting started. The many surviving Nazis fire away at him but, you know, sisu. Sisu is also what keeps Aatami upright when he absorbs bullets and shrapnel and cauterizes his own wounds and uses improvised staples to hold his abdomen together. Was he born with sisu (Finnish peoples consider it part of their national character) or did he learn it while he was a military commando whose family died in the war against Russia, inspiring him to be Baba Yaga to those Commie bastards? Not sure. But like I previously implied, he’s about to make them all look like someone dumped gallons of borscht all over the landscape. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Take Tom Waits’ prospector from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, cross him with Brad Pitt’s Nazi hunter from Inglourious Basterds and add in some tank action a la 2014’s Fury and give it a low-budget-slash-murdery vibe of any number of B-movies, and you’ve got Sisu.

Performance Worth Watching: Tommila gives the closest thing resembling a “performance” in this film, which doesn’t ask much of its actors beyond fulfilling stereotypes. But we at least can easily root for the guy, because he doesn’t deserve the pain he’s suffered, and also because he’s not a racist fascist genocidal Nazi.

Memorable Dialogue: This exchange between Nazis is evidence that Sisu is top-to-bottom grindhouse fare:

Nazi No. 1: How many mines did we bury here?

Nazi No. 2: All of them.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Netflix’s Narvik enlightened us to one of the underappreciated stories of World War II in Scandinavia, where a small Norwegian town was a linchpin in the Allied-Nazi conflict; it tied in a compelling family drama that nestled interpersonal gravitas into the larger wartime context. Sisu treads similar ground, spotlighting Finland, which was at war after a Soviet invasion; once allied with Germany, the Finns signed a treaty with the Soviets and then turned and fought the Nazis. Within that rigamarole, known as the Lapland War, one man with sisu to spare – we can almost see it oozing from his many very graphically rendered wounds – lost his family to violence and took it out on some swastika assholes in a manner befitting Rambo or the Yautja, and lo, did severed limbs fly artfully through the air and gee, did that guy get a knife through both temples, and whoa nelly, did another get his head crushed by tank treads.

This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but merely an observation. Sisu has a few credibility issues, the main one being the superheroic durability of its hero, and the inability for the Nazis to hit the broadside of the broadest barn in Finland with a single bullet. But boy, do they try, and they even sorta graze Aatami in a nonvital location. He, on the other hand, is far more creative with the way he kills people, and one of the film’s minor disappointments has to do with the establishment of a pickaxe in the first act – a goldminer’s best pal, no doubt – and a not-satisfying-enough payoff in the third. I can think of all manner of depraved and gross things one could do with a miner’s pickaxe (try me, baby!), and the movie didn’t do any of them.

But as it stands, Sisu is a true-blue B-movie with no greater purpose than indulging fantasies of dispatching sneering and terminally stupid fascist scumf—s from this mortal coil. We see the scorched earth and noosed bodies the Nazis leave behind them, and get some vile rapey vibes from them, and their disgusting ideology arrives pre-ingrained in them, and therefore they deserve every awful thing our guy does to them. It’s not some grandiose cosmic justice; it’s an eye for an eye, bucko. And Sisu gives it to us in a simple, stripped-to-the-studs storytelling manner, with lots of sub-Tarantinoisms, namely, humorously foreboding title cards (KILL ’EM ALL reads one of them) and nods to old Westerns and ’70s and ’80s genre fodder. The subtext is, don’t be a shithead, and that’s that. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sisu delivers the goods in a mildly fetishy display of violence. Note, more fetishy is typically better, but as it stands, the movie is mostly worthy of attention from your eyeballs.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.