MERCY FOR A MASS MURDERER

22 July (Cert tbc)

Verdict: Grim but powerful ★★★★✩

AS WELL as making the odd Bourne movie, British director Paul Greengrass has crafted an impressive career, writing and directing films based on traumatic real events.

These include United 93, about 9/11, and the TV films Bloody Sunday and The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence.

Now, in a Netflix production receiving a disappointingly limited theatrical release, he has turned his expert eye to the gun-and-bomb slaughter wrought by far-Right fanatic Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on July 22, 2011. It’s as grim and powerful as you’d expect, and astutely tells the story of that day and its aftermath by focusing on one survivor.

So the carnage in which 77 mostly young people died, although evoked with harrowing realism, is all over in the first half hour or so. After that, the film chronicles the tribulations of badly-injured teenager Viljar Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gavli), who must decide whether he will testify at Breivik’s trial. Greengrass tackles the difficulty of this being a story set in Norway but intended for English- language markets, by using Norwegian actors speaking in English. It works well, and compounds the sense that the film is as much a portrait of a country as of a terrorist outrage.

For example, Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie) is treated with remarkable civility after his crime, and is calmly given medical treatment after cutting his finger on a shattered fragment of a victim’s skull. Some societies would have made him suffer, but Greengrass doesn’t labour the point.

He is not averse to politicising his films, but lets this one speak eloquently for itself.

22July opens on Wednesday