Sisu: Road to Revenge review – can Aatami’s second rampage top his Nazi-killing legend?
- Legendary near-silent madman Aatami Korpi returns, now dragging his dismantled family home across Soviet-occupied Finland because therapy is clearly not an option.
- Hot on his heels is Igor Draganov, a Red Army butcher played by Stephen Lang, who treats war crimes like a competitive hobby.
- Expect old-school stunt work, deranged vehicular carnage and violence so exaggerated it loops back round to grim slapstick.
- The film turns planks, nails and dynamite into special effects showcases, with barely a whiff of Marvel-style green screen fatigue.
- It’s a lean, 89-minute action barrage that has critics purring, awards pundits muttering about stunt work, and squeamish viewers quietly sliding out of the cinema.
From cult curio to last month’s word-of-mouth bruiser
A small film muscling into a big month
Sisu: Road to Revenge arrived in UK and US cinemas in late November, tucked between franchise behemoths like Wicked: For Good and Zootopia 2. On paper it looks outgunned, with a modest budget and limited release against glittering musicals and plush talking animals.
In practice, it plays like counter-programming for anyone who thinks modern action has become too digital, polite or PG-rated. The box office has been modest, but the chatter has been loud, especially among critics and genre fans who keep yelling “best sequel since John Wick 4” every time someone mentions it.
Picking up after the first Sisu’s Nazi mulching
The original Sisu saw Aatami carve his way through a Nazi convoy with the focus of a man who considers landmines a mild inconvenience. Road to Revenge jumps forward to 1946, with Aatami returning to the site of his family home, now a ruin soaked in memory and blood.
He dismantles the entire house, loads it onto a truck and decides to haul it across dangerous territory to rebuild somewhere safer. This is less “relocation” and more “grief-driven pilgrimage with bonus explosives”, and it gives the sequel its central image and emotional spine.
Story without giving away every broken bone
A simple revenge route, complicated by Soviets
The setup is brutally straightforward. Aatami wants to move his house and honour his murdered family; the Soviet officer who ordered their deaths, Igor Draganov, wants to stop him and finish the job.
Draganov sends soldiers, armoured vehicles and sheer spite after one aging Finn with a truck full of planks, tools and alarming survival instincts. Unsurprisingly, this proves to be a terrible professional decision for most people wearing the wrong uniform.
Road movie structure with a tank’s personality
The plot unfolds as a twisted road movie, with Aatami driving, pushing and dragging his house through minefields, checkpoints and ambushes. Each encounter escalates the scale and inventiveness of the violence without over-complicating the story.
You get a series of escalating set-pieces built around trains, trucks, bombs and one very unlucky border crossing. The film keeps dialogue sparse and stakes obvious, which makes it easy to follow even if you spend half the runtime wincing.
Cryptic clues without spoiling the best bits
If you want hints rather than spoilers, remember three images: a house that becomes a weapon, a train that forgets how to stay on the tracks, and a man who refuses to stay dead long enough for anyone to write a report. When those three collide, the film hits its most outrageous stretch.
There is also a late sequence involving a very unorthodox use of propulsion that will either make you cackle or mutter “that’s not how physics works” into your popcorn. Either way, it’s better experienced than described in detail.
Themes and tone: grim history, gleeful carnage
Grief, stubbornness and Finnish gallows humour
Beneath the exploding Soviets, Sisu: Road to Revenge is about a man who simply refuses to let war erase his family. The house he drags is part coffin, part shrine and part weaponised trauma, and the film keeps returning to it as a symbol of what he’s really fighting for.
Aatami barely speaks, so the film leans on visuals, physical performance and the occasional dark joke to sketch his inner life. The humour is dry enough to cause dehydration, but it keeps the brutality from tipping into complete misery.
Violence pitched as live-action cartoon…mostly
The tone is wild, sitting somewhere between war movie, exploitation film and live-action Looney Tunes. Limbs fly, tanks flip and soldiers die in ways that are too stylised to feel realistic but still crunchy enough to make you wince.
There are moments that come close to horror in their intensity, especially when Draganov’s cruelty is front and centre. The film pulls away just before it becomes unwatchable, then undercuts the tension with a gag involving, say, improvised dentistry or poorly timed bravado.
Performances: a silent hammer and one very loud villain
Jorma Tommila’s Aatami – a face that does all the talking
Jorma Tommila barely utters a word, but he does not need to. His performance is all in the eyes, posture and the way he trudges under the weight of the house, as if every plank remembers what happened inside it.
He sells Aatami as a man who has seen so much horror that everything now is just administration. When he does react strongly, it lands with real force, because you can feel how much it takes to crack that granite shell.
Stephen Lang’s Draganov – theatrical monstrosity done right
Stephen Lang approaches Igor Draganov with the enthusiasm of a man who has been handed a moustache-twirling villain and told to break it. He growls, sneers and prowls his way through the film like a Soviet shark who has discovered a personal hatred of timber.
Yet there is a streak of pathetic ego underneath the brutality, which keeps him from becoming a cartoon. He is terrifying, but also clearly hollow, defined entirely by the idea of breaking something that refuses to break back.
Any awards potential in all this chaos?
In terms of mainstream awards, this is more likely to show up in critic lists than at the Oscars, thanks to its low profile and unapologetic nastiness. That said, there is serious talk about it in action and genre circles, especially around stunt coordination and practical effects.
Tommila’s work is the kind of performance that quietly becomes iconic in cult circles rather than on red carpets. Lang, meanwhile, delivers the sort of scenery-chewing turn that could easily pick up a villain-of-the-year mention in end-of-year write-ups.
Action and special effects: all about the physicality
Old-school stunts instead of digital mush
The real star of Sisu: Road to Revenge is the action design. Director Jalmari Helander and his team lean heavily on practical stunts, bruising falls and carefully rigged explosions rather than drowning everything in CGI fog.
Vehicles slam, skid and flip with a weight that feels real, even when the scenarios border on absurd. You can tell actual stunt performers have risked actual limbs, which gives the film a rough, tactile energy missing from many bigger-budget releases.
Gore, sound and visual flair
The violence is gory, but it is also oddly beautiful in its composition. Blood sprays against snow and mud in exaggerated arcs, and the camera often lingers just long enough to make you laugh in disbelief rather than recoil in disgust.
Sound design does a lot of heavy lifting too, from the squelch of knife meets bone to the distant rumble of artillery. The score layers in pounding rhythms and mournful motifs, keeping things just emotional enough to stop the whole enterprise becoming pure nihilism.
Who should actually watch this?
Perfect for action fiends, risky for the squeamish
If you enjoyed the first Sisu, the Mad Max films or lean revenge thrillers, this is squarely aimed at you. It is short, vicious and oddly uplifting in its commitment to one man refusing to let history roll over him.
It is less friendly to viewers who struggle with graphic violence or war imagery. The film is deliberately excessive, and while the tone is often darkly comic, the brutality is still front and centre.
Cinema trip, streaming night or skip?
On the big screen, the film’s stunts, landscapes and sound design hit much harder. Watching Aatami drive his house through hell on a vast canvas has a strange, mythic power you will never get on a tablet balanced on a pillow.
For UK viewers looking for something very different from polished franchise fare, it is an excellent late-night showing with friends who can handle a bit of splatter. If your idea of a good time is more gentle romcom than grenade-juggling pensioner, consider this a very polite warning label.
Verdict: does Sisu: Road to Revenge earn its reputation?
A brutal, funny and weirdly moving sequel
Sisu: Road to Revenge takes everything that made the first film a cult hit and pushes it further without bloating the runtime. It is nastier, funnier and more emotionally direct, turning a simple revenge plot into a feverish road saga about grief, stubbornness and refusing to lie down.
It will not be for everyone, and it certainly is not aiming for four-quadrant holiday appeal. But for last month’s cinema-goers who wanted something lean, grimly hilarious and utterly unconcerned with franchise homework, this was one of the most satisfying punches to the face money could buy.