Sisu (2022)

Sisu arrives with a lean premise and an even leaner protagonist. Aatami Korpi, a Finnish commando turned prospector, digs gold out of the Lapland soil and then spends the rest of the runtime ensuring a Waffen-SS platoon does not take it from him. The film is a pastiche of First Blood and spaghetti westerns, and it knows exactly what it is. Nazis die in inventive ways. A pickaxe is employed. The horse does not make it. There is no thesis here, only a body count assembled with uncommon craftsmanship.

The cast is Finnish and white, which is what the setting dictates and nothing more. The captive women trailing the convoy function as plot devices for most of the picture, then briefly become something else: Aino seizes a truck, the women take up rifles, and a commandeered tank rolls toward the Finnish lines with a battered SS officer strapped to the turret. It is a satisfying beat. It is not an argument. Anyone arriving in search of a gender politics reading will find the film has already moved on to the next explosion.

The villains are Nazis, which requires no ideological framing, and they want gold, which is pulp treasure-hunt material and nothing beyond it. The wilderness serves as a backdrop for violence, not an environmental lament. Aatami says almost nothing for two hours, and when he finally speaks it is to request large bills from a bank teller. That single line is the closest the film comes to commentary, and it is a joke about the weight of gold. No sermon follows. No moral instruction is offered. The film's only conviction is that a man with a knife and a grudge can accomplish a great deal. We have seen this before, many times, and we will see it again. The sequel is already scheduled. The classification, in this case, is refreshingly brief.