Earning a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes, Sisu has just landed on Netflix, with a highly anticipated sequel expected to arrive in late 2025. Set during the last days of the Second World War, this gory Finnish historical action thriller tells the story of a lone gold prsopector who must battle a retreating Nazi squad to protect a stash of gold he’s discovered in the Lapland wilderness. Directed and written by Jalmari Helander, Sisu merges historical war drama with pulpy action fantasy, earning critical acclaim for its storytelling and action-packed sequences while fictionalising the events between Finland and Nazi Germany towards the end of the war.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film is praised for being as “narratively lean as it is deliriously gory” with critics calling it an “inspired pastiche that gives bloody satisfaction to action aficionados”. Audiences have also described it as “a gory grindhouse good time” that’s perfect for anyone who’s ever wondered what a John Wick vs. Nazis film might look like.
The gold prospector, played by Jorma Tommila, stumbles upon the massive gold deposit but then crosses paths with a ruthless Nazi death squad led by a brutal SS officer during their scorched-earth retreat from Finland.
When they steal his gold, they soon realise that the prospector is no ordinary miner but actually a legendary ex-commando with a near-superhuman will to survive and a quiet, unbreakable resolve known in Finnish as sisu.
Sisu is a word that struggles to be translated directly and literally into English, but it means extreme grit, courage, and infinite determination.
Armed with nothing but his tools and his resolve, Korpi becomes a one-man army, unleashing a relentless violence among the stark landscapes of the harsh Lapland wilderness.
Rotten Tomatoes writes: “No matter what the Nazis throw at him, the one-man death squad will go to outrageous lengths to get his gold back.”
Calum Cooper wrote on the platform: “Helander is no stranger to raw entertainment; his previous films, Big Game and Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, are both. Sisu might be his best film yet. Its combination of ridiculous fun with genuinely compelling themes is a mixture few filmmakers can pull off successfully, yet Helander does so with flying colours.”
Sisu premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 and debuted in the UK in May 2023.