Sisu: Road to Revenge

Sisu has had a strange life. Made by the same team that gave us Rare Exports, it landed fairly quietly at TIFF 2022. Its reception was warm enough, however, to be picked up for distribution. And although its US release didn't light the box office on fire, it performed quite well relative to its budget, and made some waves in online film circles. Its grimy, gleeful excesses placed it in a hyper-stylized and mythological vein just this side of cartoonish, a very successful framework within which to deliver catharsis. A man who wished to leave behind violence is turned into a folk hero before our eyes, someone who embodied the spirit of an entire country, and we got to watch him indiscriminately dismantle the Nazis who stole his gold and left him for dead. There's even a small subplot in which he armed their female Finnish captives, granting us joyous scenes of the powerless violently rising up against their abusers. And given its filming in Finland's Lapland, all was set amongst gorgeous (albeit sparse) landscapes with gentle hills and stunning sunsets, spitting in the face of Nazi desecration.

The myth-making story of Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) concluded perfectly, so the production of a sequel was both unnecessary and surprising. The character sprang into being fully formed, but worked because slowly revealing his backstory functioned as a character arc. If we've come to its end, and now know exactly how tough and resourceful and dangerous he is, what is there left to do with him?

Read my full review on Pop Culture Maniacs.