It's not worth going up against him, not for all the gold
in Lapland
dir: Jalmari Helander
2022
Now, having watched a film where people skilfully murder legions of Nazis a couple of nights ago, I decided to stick with the theme and watch another film about someone murdering Nazis, except this one is more of a one-man-genocide type of thing, and he never asked for it anyway.
He didn’t start the fight, but he’s going to finish it.
In the last days of World War II, Nazis are fleeing Finland, but they’re also scorching the earth as they retreat, laying land mines and slaughtering innocents just for the fuck of it on their way out the door. A platoon of salty fuckers come across a man who was minding his own business, and try to end him for whatever he was carrying, which in this case happens to be a shitload of gold that he dug up himself.
Nazis, being Nazis, don’t know how to share, or just let people be. So Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) is forced to painfully slaughter these malign idiots one by one.
It’s funny to me that this flick, with a different emphasis and shift of perspective, and a bit of re-writing, could just as easily be a story where a scared, remorseful squad of Nazi deserters are terrorised and gruesomely dispatched by a ruthless, almost mythological monster, picking them off in the dark or through the fog until the last man is left standing, or clutching a bloodied stump.
This is, like all films about World War II currently, indebted openly to fucking Quentin Tarantino, and not only his take on Italian 70s exploitation trash like Inglourious Basterds, but also his reinterpretation / re-appropriation of Sergio Leonie’s spaghetti Western motifs, musical cues, even down to the goddamn fonts (and their colour) used for the onscreen text. It’s, like, I’m sick of Tarantino’s infection infecting everything (which was painfully obvious in Guy Ritchie’s recent The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), but it’s not ill-used here.
What is the purpose of this movie… well, everyone else gets to make patriotic movies about what badasses they are, why not the Finns? In Aatami, as per the title of the movie, they have the literal embodiment of a national character trait they believe is not only specific to Finns, but that it’s untranslatable to non-Finnish speakers. It’s beyond stoicism, beyond resoluteness, beyond grit and determination. Beyond brutal.
It’s probably a crock of shit, and I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone say something so patronising as “oh, well, this concept doesn’t translate properly into your petty bullshit language”.
To that I say, “Try harder, you try-hard.”
But whatever that set of character traits and beliefs is, he is the real deal. A myth, a legend from the earlier war against the Russians known as the Winter War (that the commies lost, ha!), he was nicknamed Koschei which they translate as The immortal here, but I know of the figure in Russian folklore, and he’s usually called Koschei the Deathless, at least in the books I’ve read.
Still, he’s Finnish, so he’s a hero to the Finns. He is a nightmare to the Russians, and he is Hell Incarnate now for the Germans.
As deliberately stylised as the film is, and as incredibly gory and violent, it is not cartoonish. Sure, of course I want to watch Nazi die painfully, but most of the wounds and gore are reserved for Aatami himself, his poor horse, and his absurdly loyal dog.
When I say it’s not completely cartoonish (for most of its running time, which is an appreciable and breezy 90 minutes), that doesn’t mean I’m saying it’s in any way realistic. It’s as realistic as any film where one guy guys 50 armed Nazis – it’s practically a fantasy. Mostly he cheats death in ways that aren’t too outlandish or too much of a conceit, but that falls by the wayside by the end, which goes full Fast & Furious in its disregard for gravity and earth physics.
But I did not mind by that stage, because I got to watch him butcher a bunch of Nazis like the hogs that they are. Despite being a film from Finland, all the dialogue, most of it spoken by the Nazis, is in English. The only prominent actor that I know from this is the cold, malicious leader of the Nazis, and that’s only because I recognise him as one of the astronauts from The Martian.
Aatapi himself doesn’t speak except at the very end of the flick, in Finnish, in what I guess was a joke that would have killed in his native homeland. But I didn’t care. Because I was grateful at film’s end for his sterling work, and glad those fucking Nazis all got their comeuppance.
This is the kind of film where someone kills people with pickaxes or by throwing landmines at them, so that should set the tone, or at least the level of expectations. It’s gory, it’s vicious, and it depicts the Nazis as brutal childish rapists and racists, so it’s entirely accurate and historically based.
There is an intrusion into the action and the hilarity, being a truckload of kidnapped Finnish women who the Nazis have taken as prizes, and that’s both creepy and queasy. I’m sure it’s little consolation, but they get to have their revenge too, so I kinda support their presence in the narrative.
There is a great scene where a cocky and stupid young Nazi is insulting the women for believing a fairytale, and one of them tells the story of Aatapi, and in the telling you see the arrogance on the soldier’s faces give way to eventual terror.
When asked if she actually believes Aatapi is immortal, one of the woman calmly says “No, but it’s that he just refuses to die.”
Right before they’re brutally murdered, of course.
I have to give up massive respect for this silent, determined killer, and the actor portraying him. It’s maybe not completely believable, in the way that action movies with frail older chaps are always a bit unbelievable, but this guy absolutely comes across as someone who could wade through lakes of blood and butcher everyone in his way while taking bullets, blades and shrapnel everywhere that those things shouldn’t go, and still keep going, like the Finnish terminator that he is.
I’m not sure it’s much of an advertisement for Finland itself. Most of the film transpires on or in an area called Lapland, which looks like the blasted heath of many a cold country, only more sparse, and even less hospitable. It’s a perfect hellscape upon which the brutality of the Nazis and Aatapi can shine.
I really enjoyed this, because it keeps things moving, and it managed to get the tone just right.
And there’s nothing wrong with Finnish people holding their heads up high for a change.
8 times you’d think people would know not to fuck with grizzled old survivors in the wilderness who can clearly take care of themselves out of 10
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