Jorma Tommila in Sisu: Road to Revenge [Sony Pictures]

SISU: THE ROAD TO REVENGE
Directed by Jalmari Helmander
Certificate: 18
☆☆☆☆

Sisu! This lovely word from Finland means grit your teeth – something is coming down the line that will test your strength. It’s the sort of thing the Finns shout as they leap into icy waters, and is a fitting title for Finnish film director Jalmari Helmander’s war films.

They focus on Finns and just how much sisu they have spare: this sequel, like the first, is essentially a series of gruelling on-screen trials.

In the first instalment, Finnish army commando Atami Korpi (Jormi Tommila) took on the SS. In this follow-up, Hitler has been dead for a year and instead his enemy switches from Nazis to Stalin’s henchmen.

We learn that Korpi’s family were brutally murdered by a gang of Soviet soldiers. In vengeance, he set about killing as many as he can. His whereabouts is brought to the attention of the KGB. Korpi has driven a ramshackle old flat-bed truck – a vehicle that becomes a character in its own right – across the border into what was once Finnish land, now swallowed up by the USSR.

His plan is to dismantle his homestead, pile the logs onto the truck and drive them back into Finland. There, he’ll find himself a lakeside spot, rebuild his home and wallow in grief.

War criminal Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang) has other ideas. He is released from a Siberian prison on the proviso that he kills Korpi. We get a ringside seat to watch him try. What transpires is essentially a chase punctuated by ever-more inventive ways for cannon fodder characters to spill their guts and brains.

This is a film that thrives on its sadistic originality. New ways of meeting bloody ends – and an extraordinary special effects team that makes Helmander’s outrageously gruesome imagination come to life – is the main plank of all that transpires.

Lead man Tommila has not one word of dialogue to utter: instead, he must grimace with pain throughout.

Scenes are broken up into chapter-headed skits, a nod towards the pulp fiction Western series that Helmander is clearly influenced by.

This story might not be to everyone’s taste but for those who like their films to have some Mad Max-style brutalism, Sisu is the absolute pinnacle of a Western revenge tale transposed into a new time and place.