Unknown Soldier (2017)

War movies have a habit of lying to you. They dress up carnage in golden light, they give the dying man a final speech worth quoting, and they send you home feeling vaguely uplifted. Unknown Soldier does none of that. It looks you square in the eye and says: this is what it costs. And then it keeps on saying it, for nearly three hours, until you feel every last pfennig of that cost somewhere behind your ribcage.

I came to this as part of my A-Z World Movie Challenge, Finland's entry, and I'll be honest, I wasn't sure what I was walking into beyond frostbite and a vague sense of doom. What I got was one of the most unsparing portraits of combat I've seen in years. The film follows a machine gun squad through Finland's Continuation War, and it refuses, at every turn, to make any of it look worth it. Victories feel hollow. Losses feel personal. The landscape itself, all frozen ground and skeletal trees, seems to have given up on the whole enterprise long before the men have.

There's no trumpet swell here. No rousing speech about what they're fighting for. Just mud and blood and the particular kind of exhaustion that settles into a person's face when they've been cold and scared for too long. The ensemble cast carry that weight brilliantly. You feel the hunger, the fraying nerves, the dark gallows humour that soldiers use to keep the worst thoughts at arm's length. The camaraderie is earned rather than announced, which makes the losses land that much harder.

The sound design deserves a mention too. I've seen complaints about the mix, but watching with subtitles (my Finnish extends to "kiitos" and absolutely nothing else), I found the sonic chaos completely immersive. Gunfire didn't just crack, it rattled. Artillery didn't just boom, it pressed against the chest like something physical. That's the kind of craft that pulls you out of your living room and drops you into a frozen tree line somewhere you very much don't want to be. It reminded me a little of how 1917 (2019) uses sound and landscape to make the front feel suffocatingly real, though Unknown Soldier is rawer and less interested in spectacle.

Where it does struggle, and this is worth flagging, is context. Finland's role in the Second World War is genuinely complicated. They fought the Soviet Union, then aligned with Nazi Germany, then turned on Germany. It's a geopolitical breakup tour that reads like a fever dream, and the film offers you essentially no hand-holding through any of it. I had to pause more than once to google whose side we were currently on and why the situation had shifted again. A bit of scene-setting early on wouldn't have hurt, and if you're going in with limited knowledge of the Continuation War, I'd suggest doing a quick read beforehand. That's not a fatal flaw, but it does create a layer of distance that the film has to work to overcome.

It overcomes it, mostly. The sheer commitment to honesty carries you through the gaps in your historical knowledge, because whatever the political context, the human experience on screen is universal and grim. This is what prolonged conflict does to people. It hollows them out. It makes the simple act of staying sane feel like a daily victory.

I wouldn't call myself a war movie enthusiast by any stretch. I find the genre too often tips into either glorification or misery-as-spectacle, neither of which sits right with me. Unknown Soldier avoids both traps. It's not glamorising anything, and it's not wallowing either. It's just bearing witness, with a steadiness that I found genuinely affecting even when it was exhausting me.

Three and a half stars.

Not my usual cuppa. But I respect the hell out of its honesty, and for a war movie sceptic, that really is saying something.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-06-19

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
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Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Kino Film Collection
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