The first time Jalmari Helander saw first blood at the local theater in his small Finnish village of Jokela, he looked forward to becoming John Rambo. He remembers immediately returning home to run through the forest near his home, armed with all of Rambo’s essentials – bow and arrows, headband, huge knife – emulating the stoic warrior of the 80s. becoming a filmmaker, the film remained his north star and greatest inspiration, especially the moment when Rambo pulls a sewing kit from the bottom of his knife and begins to sew up his lacerated arm on the edge of a cliff. .

“I was so blown away by the scene,” Helander said on a recent Zoom call from inside his office, framed by a huge first blood poster hanging on the wall behind him. “I wanted to pay homage to that, but in a more badass way.”

It’s a big challenge to make a movie more badass than one of the greatest action movies of all time, but four decades after that fateful trip to the movies, Helander threw his hat in the ring with Sisu, his third feature, released in theaters last week. It’s a 90-minute visceral punch and the ultimate exercise in lean action filmmaking.

In the mold of Helander’s cinematic hero, the film follows Aatami Korpi (Joram Tommila), a grizzled gold digger and former military commander whose family was massacred during World War II. In their absence, he lived a lonely life as a ruthless and vengeful killing machine, roaming the Finnish countryside with his faithful horse and dog and embodying the film’s title, which Helander says best translates to “a form of white-knuckled courage and unimaginable determination that manifests when all hope is lost.

The setup of its eventual rampage is, like the best action movies, simple and effective: At the end of the war, a Nazi battalion makes a scorched-earth retreat through Lapland, a snowy region of northern Scandinavia. , where he encounters Aatami and attempts to steal his massive gold loot. Big mistake.

Soon, Aatami unleashes carnage on his Aryan raiders – shooting, stabbing and bludgeoning them – provoking their SS leader into a series of deadly escalations. Throughout their game of cat and mouse over the arid wilderness, Aatami unleashes hell with creative imagination for bloody retaliation, beheading, slicing and grenades Nazis to smithereens, his mythos growing with each death depicted gratuitously. In overt tribute to Rambo’s guerrilla ingenuity, Aatami even cauterizes his own abdominal slashes with gasoline, barbed wire, and matches.

SisuThe indestructible, traveling protagonist and meat-and-potatoes plot have been compared to Mad Max: Fury Road And John Wick, recent and robust examples of no-frills, high-octane action. And it continues the trend of gray screen veterans (Bob Odenkirk in Person, Gerard Butler and Liam Neeson in…everything) taking matters into his own hands. So far, the reaction – first at the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness, then across European cinemas – has been joyous and boisterous. But Helander’s historical slant and deliberate style distinguish Sisu other old-man Hollywood epics, leaning into his country’s expansive beauty while illustrating its forgotten strength in the mid-twentieth century. Aatami is, essentially, a symbol of Finnish masculinity – calm, humble and strong. “If I put it briefly,” says Helander, “the message of the movie is, ‘Don’t fuck with the Ends. “”