Paul Greengrass’s gruelling dramatisation of far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 massacre of 77 civilians in Oslo and on Utøya is one of two new films to tackle this sobering Norwegian tragedy. The other is Erik Poppe’s single-take retelling Utøya – July 22. Mercifully, this film spends most of its running time looking at the aftershocks experienced by the survivors of the attack, though Greengrass doesn’t spare us entirely, capturing, in his typical vérité fashion, how Breivik (played with troubling charisma by Anders Danielsen Lie) gunned down a summer camp of kids he deemed “Marxists, liberals, and members of the elite”. The decision to turn the film into a procedural with a redemptive ending feels like an attempt to grasp at justice, but it’s harrowing to watch all the same, yet offering little context and few fresh insights.
