North Finland at the tail end of WW2. A lone, grizzled miner, his one-eyed dog and horse search for gold in an austerely beautiful landscape. Suddenly he strikes a seam: he’s rich! So he plods off on his horse back to civilisation where he meets retreating, psychopathic Nazis out of Mad Maxdom, destroying everything in their path.
They want his gold. He isn’t going to let them have it.
“Sisu” is an untranslatable Finnish word meaning, “Grit in the face of terrible adversity.”
The prospector, played by grim Jorma Tommila, is rich, not just in gold, but Sisu.
Cue about 60 minutes of ever increasingly violent, and ridiculous Nazi killing, as our hero turns out to be pretty much indestructible. He kills them like cockroaches with every possible implement and weapon he can get hold of, including pickaxes, knives, and hand-thrown mines.
The Nazis have a truckload of sex-slave women. Eventually the miner frees them and we get to cheer on their homicidal revenge. It’s that sort of film.
It is an enjoyable romp, if you are OK with comic ultra-violence, of a Tom-and-Jerry sort. The cinematography and sound design are high quality. It’s not a cinematic masterpiece, but good enough to spend time with. Incidentally, it has English dialogue instead of subtitles, so I suspect they made a Finnish and an English version simultaneously: it’s not a film with a lot of talking.