Writer/Director Jalmari Helander delivered a delightfully wicked twist to Santa Claus in 2010’s genre-bender Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Helander’s latest, Sisu, sees the filmmaker reteaming with some familiar Rare Exports faces for another crowd-pleasing genre-bender, this time an R-rated journey through Lapland near the end of World War II. The period action adventure goes hard on hyper-violence and has a sense of humor to match.
Jorma Tommila (Rare Exports) stars as Aatami, a former soldier turned solitary miner living out in the wilderness with his loyal dog and horse. When Aatami uncovers an impressive pile of gold, he loads up his haul and begins a trek to the closest town to trade it for cash. He crosses paths with a Nazi battalion led by the ruthless SS Obersturmführer (Aksel Hennie). The Nazis intend to leave Aatami for dead and steal his gold, but they don’t realize...
Jorma Tommila (Rare Exports) stars as Aatami, a former soldier turned solitary miner living out in the wilderness with his loyal dog and horse. When Aatami uncovers an impressive pile of gold, he loads up his haul and begins a trek to the closest town to trade it for cash. He crosses paths with a Nazi battalion led by the ruthless SS Obersturmführer (Aksel Hennie). The Nazis intend to leave Aatami for dead and steal his gold, but they don’t realize...
- 4/28/2023
- by Meagan Navarro
- bloody-disgusting.com
Quentin Dupieux awarded screenplay prize ex-aequo with himself for Smoking Causes Coughing and Incredible But True.
Finnish production Sisu directed by Jalmari Helander took the main award at the 55th edition of Sitges, marking the director’s second time winning the prestigious Catalan genre event’s best feature award after his 2010 selection Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale.
Helander’s third feature also earned best actor at Europe’s biggest genre film festival for Jorma Tommila, cinematography for Kjell Lagerroos, and music for Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä. Handled by Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (excluding Nordics), the Second World War survival...
Finnish production Sisu directed by Jalmari Helander took the main award at the 55th edition of Sitges, marking the director’s second time winning the prestigious Catalan genre event’s best feature award after his 2010 selection Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale.
Helander’s third feature also earned best actor at Europe’s biggest genre film festival for Jorma Tommila, cinematography for Kjell Lagerroos, and music for Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä. Handled by Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (excluding Nordics), the Second World War survival...
- 10/16/2022
- by Emilio Mayorga
- ScreenDaily
Nazis die and Finns triumph in the Finnish WW2 thriller “Sisu,” a spaghetti Western–style action-adventure set in the Lapland plains of Finland. In this polished genre exercise, a stubborn Finnish gold prospector runs away from, and also violently dispatches, a group of Nazis during the war’s concluding months.
Writer-director Jalmari Helander doesn’t really develop his post-post-modern pastiche beyond its basic high-concept premise, so “Sisu” — premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival — never becomes more than an energetically realized live-action cartoon. Thankfully, Helander and his collaborators deliver a good-enough potboiler, thanks especially to the invigorating contributions of cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos and editor Juho Virolainen.
There’s not much more to “Sisu”, but it certainly looks good and moves briskly from one action scene to the next.
That said, you might be disappointed by “Sisu” if you expect it to develop, either in terms of narrative momentum or dramatic tension.
Writer-director Jalmari Helander doesn’t really develop his post-post-modern pastiche beyond its basic high-concept premise, so “Sisu” — premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival — never becomes more than an energetically realized live-action cartoon. Thankfully, Helander and his collaborators deliver a good-enough potboiler, thanks especially to the invigorating contributions of cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos and editor Juho Virolainen.
There’s not much more to “Sisu”, but it certainly looks good and moves briskly from one action scene to the next.
That said, you might be disappointed by “Sisu” if you expect it to develop, either in terms of narrative momentum or dramatic tension.
- 9/10/2022
- by Simon Abrams
- The Wrap
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