SPOILER SPECIAL
Sisu
DIRECTOR JALMARI HELANDER ON THE STANDOUT MOMENTS FROM HIS ULTRA-VIOLENT WORLD WAR II MOVIE
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
IN A YEAR filled with cracking action movies, Jalmari Helander’s Sisu has, perhaps, gone under the radar a little. It shouldn’t have. The Finnish director’s first film in eight years is a streamlined but utterly savage World War II thriller, set in Finnish Lapland, about a one-man army (Aatami, played by Jorma Tommila) who goes medieval on the posteriors of an entire Nazi squadron when they take the gold he’s just panhandled. Helander split the film into chapters, and here he opens the book on his tale’s finest moments.
CHAPTER ONE: THE GOLD
“It happened during the editing, it wasn’t in the script,” says Helander of his decision to incorporate chapters, and lurid chapter headings. “It somehow felt too serious, and so chapters set the tone right away. There was a point when I wanted to take them away again.” Thankfully, he didn’t. In the first chapter, we meet and observe Aatami as he, and his dog, search patiently for gold. It’s one of only two chapters in the movie in which nobody dies. “It was really important to me to have a calm, quiet beginning, just to see this man doing what he does,” adds Helander. “I know that action films should start with an action scene, but I was really certain that would be a big mistake.”