Sisu: Road to Revenge – Movie Review

TL;DR – While it loses some of its drive halfway through, it is still the action romp that it needs to be as carnage stretches across Russia.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There are mid-credit sequences.

Disclosure – I paid to watch this film.

Sisu: A Finnish word that cannot be translated. It means the white-knuckled force of courage and unimaginable determination.

Sisu: Road to Revenge Review Introduction

It is that time of year when I take a look back on 2025, and see all the films that I missed that I need to take a look at before I start my best of 2025 lists. I won’t get to all of them; there isn’t enough time. However, one film I knew I had to see was the follow-up to a Finnish gem from 2023. Sisu is one of the few films in the post-John Wick era that took the action style and improved on it. But can lightning strike twice?  


So, to set the scene, after WW2, Finland lost territory to the Soviet Union, and the Finns living there were forced to flee. In 1946, after finding all that gold in Lappland, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) returned to his home in Karelia, now on the wrong side of the border, to where his dead family once lived, hoping to take the house and rebuild it in a land of peace. But when Aatami crossed the border, his passport triggered a response in Soviet high command. The KGB (Richard Brake) tasks Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang), the man who killed Aatami’s family, to finish the job. But Aatami is a man who has left hundreds of Red Army and Nazi corpses in his wake, and he won’t go down without a fight.    

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Sisu – Movie Review

TL;DR – An electric meditation on violence and the lengths people will go to survive.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid to see this film.

A horse rides over the Lapland countryside.

Sisu Review

Violence can be used for many things in cinema. It can be shocking, used for humour, tell a moral, used to scare, or even offend. Recently, we have seen the popularisation of the reverse slasher film, where you rally behind those dishing out the violence. We can all rally behind John Wick as he takes down those who killed his dog, but can we translate that into a war setting? Well, this is what we are exploring today.

So to set the scene, in 1944, it was the closing months of WW2, and after Finland signed the Moscow Armistice, they were required to evict any Nazi presence from the country. The Nazis then start a scorched earth campaign as they retreat through Lapland to reach the Norwegian border. Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) lives in the Lapland wilderness, mining for gold with his dog and horse as the only companions. After finding a rich gold reef, he returns to Helsinki to deposit it at the bank when he comes across Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) and his retreating SS platoon. This first group lets him pass, but carnage breaks loose when the second spots the gold.

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