A gruelling, uneasy experience
Utøya: July 22 15 cert, 97 min
Dir Erik Poppe Starring Andrea Berntzen, Aleksander Holmen, Solveig Koløen Birkeland, Brede Fristad, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Jenny Svennevig
If anyone was crying out for a dramatic reconstruction of the 2011 Anders Breivik attacks in Norway, they suddenly have a choice of two films: Paul Greengrass’s post-mortem docudrama 22 July, streaming on Netflix, and the home-grown Utøya: July 22, by Erik Poppe, which competed for the Golden Bear in Berlin this February and now reaches us in cinemas.
Where Greengrass’s film gives Breivik, as it were, his day in court
– the bulk of it dramatising his defeat in trial – Poppe’s approach is radically different, and opts not to afford him even so much as a close-up. In fact, though the film is almost entirely a real-time account of his rampage around the Utøya summer camp, he is glimpsed just once, as a shadowy figure on a crag, wielding his rifle.
To have been one of the hundreds of youngsters embroiled in his terror campaign that day – even one of the 69 he killed there – is not necessarily to have seen the man himself, which is what makes this decision bold and legitimate. Undoubtedly, you would have heard him – the blasts of his arsenal around the island grow and fade, in and out, over the course of this 72-minute ordeal. But Poppe’s approach is experiential, disorienting, as real a resort to hide-and-seek as possible. In the now familiar way, after the likes of Birdman and Victoria, it also unfolds in a single, ostensibly unbroken take, after a brief prologue dealing with the other Breivik attack that day, when a car bomb detonated in Oslo.
The camera is then locked on a single protagonist, Kaja (Andrea Berntzen), as her initial bewilderment turns into a scurrying battle to survive, and to find her missing sister Emilie (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne), last seen in their now-abandoned tent, with all hell breaking loose.
On the technical and also performance level, the film is gruellingly impressive. Berntzen has the massive task of modulating her character’s terror and exhaustion for the whole innings, and never strikes a false note: we feel right there by her side. Perhaps even more memorable, in her brief screen time, is Solveig Koløen Birkeland, playing a shivering, unnamed casualty, mortally wounded in the back, who Kaja tries to help in her dying moments.
Still, Poppe resorts to a few more questionable tactics that don’t entirely allay your doubts about the artistic opportunism of the project. After crouching down in such a moving lull with the Birkeland character, there’s a screenplay-workshop of a scene with a boy called Magnus (Aleksander Holmen), with the teens discussing their hopes and dreams.
Our tricksy introduction to Kaja, meanwhile, has her looking right down the camera lens, saying “You won’t understand” to her mother on the phone (but also to us). And our momentary goodbye to her is a mess, when the camera races away after Magnus, jolting us aesthetically from her force field and making us uncomfortably aware of the artifice all this has involved.
Utøya: July 22 has pockets of great power along the way, but it’s an uneasy watch in ways it both does and doesn’t intend. TR