Sisu 4K 2022 2160p WEB-DL

1944. German troops are retreating from Finland, and along the way they are burning villages and looting everything they can. Near one of the Lappish villages, they bump into a silent man named Aatami (Jorma Tommila). He, with a pickaxe at his side, is searching for gold in the hilly surroundings - and has just found a whole deposit of precious ore. The Germans try to take the gold from the man, but Aatami proves to be quite a handful: he brutally kills his enemies. After this, an SS special squad opens a hunt for the main character and his gold.

Sisu 4K Review
Director Yalmari Helander returns to cinema after a long lull. His last film, the Hollywood action film with Samuel L. Jackson, The Big Game, was released back in 2014. And his biggest hit, the black horror comedy "Santa For Sale," was in 2010, 13 years ago. The pause was not in vain for Helander: "Immortal" looks like a work of errors in many ways. The same "Santa" suffered from a certain redundancy, especially against the background of the capacious original short film. Curious in itself, the film hunched under the weight of an ill-conceived mythology, betraying a killer concept for the sake of trying to be everything, everywhere and at once. There's nothing even close to that about Immortal. There is nothing superfluous about this film at all.

The character has no lines until the finale. The location is essentially one - an endless frosty Lapland field. The conflict is explained in three words: Aatami kills Nazis. The laconic timeline of 91 minutes (and that's with the credits) consists mostly of action scenes. In between are short conversations between the Germans who do not understand what they have stumbled upon. The Finnish prisoners of war are quick to explain to them: the man, they say, lost his family during the Winter War and went out alone to kill hundreds of Soviet soldiers. For that they nicknamed him Koschei. After all, he is apparently immortal.

Helander's film is cleverly assembled from elements of other action movies about mythic heroes. Aatami destroys enemies with the talent of John Wick, his fellow Slavic fairy tale moniker, sticks the Nazis in the wheels like Indiana Jones, and plays catch-up to any Mad Max. True, the Finnish Koshchei often has to travel on foot. He has a traumatic past, his legendary status hangs over his protagonist, and the only family members are his pets: a dog and a horse (of course, not all of them will make it to the finale). It was very easy to make the film sound secondary, but the director sidesteps accusations of clichés quite gracefully. Helander leaves the story with only a dry genre structure, devoting the movie entirely to the action. We learn about Aatama's life only from the discussions of the other characters: no flashbacks, no nerdy reflection of any kind. He remains that myth until the credits roll, an unstoppable force of nature. It's easy to imagine that if the story had been told from the perspective of SS soldiers, Aatami would have been a typical slasher monster. He, too, appears out of nowhere and kills his opponents in the most creative and sometimes vile ways he can think of.

The film's minimalism may make it seem too mechanical: there is only business to be said, the relatively "quiet" moments between action sequences are clearly only needed to catch your breath, the subplot with the Finnish prisoners is an obvious way to add some dramatic weight to the story. After all, otherwise Aatami would just be fighting for a bag of gold. But Immortal is too action-oriented to be hindered in any way by plot ascesis. This is Finland's "Fury Road": a catalog of inventive episodes where people are torn to pieces by land mines and other people's tracheas are used as scuba tanks. With each passing second, the film moves further and further from a gritty action movie to a sci-fi grunge and doesn't slow down for a moment. It would seem, how many action scenes can you basically come up with when your only location is an empty field? It turns out, a lot, if you have the imagination. And if you're willing to accept the little conventions of the genre, like the fact that the SS soldiers here are all as one incredibly blind.