Movie-Review: Utoya 22. Juli - Painful Realism

 

 

On July 22, 2011, the norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb in the center of the capital Oslo, which killed several people and injured some others. Two hours later, armed with an automatic rifle, he entered the nearby island of Utøya, where a youth camp was stationed, and shot 69 people there in about 90 minutes. A total of 77 people fell victim to the Breivik attacks, and more were injured and damaged for their lives. The perpetrator was arrested on the same day and is now serving his 21-year prison sentence with subsequent preventive detention.

So much for the facts. It was a terrorist attack that, at the time, made the whole european continent hold its breath, and had a sad, unique character through its brutality and abomination. If you make a film about such a relatively young, geographically in your own country located and tragic topic, it's definitely not easy, neither for the norwegian director Erik Poppe, nor for the viewer. It certainly wasn't for me, but I didn't expect that either.

The worst and best thing about this movie is that it is authentic. We follow 'protagonist' Kaja in the youth camp on the island minutes before the attack, and then all the way through it, and we always have the feeling of really being there ourselves, of experiencing and knowing how it feels and how it looks - Not an enviable feeling. But it makes this documentary film so much more terrifying. With a little more than 15 minutes, it takes exactly the right time to establish and introduce the young people of the camp together with our identification figure Kaja and her relationships. In general, the film is naturally very exhausting to watch - it 'only' lasts 93 minutes, but feels longer than two hours, not in a negative sense though. 

The escalation that takes place here with the intrusion of Breivik on the island, who disguised himself as a policeman, spoke to the young people and then started shooting at them, happens fast and messy, and completely believable. One thing is very important and appreciative to emphasize: The terrorist and mass murderer has no stage in this movie. You hardly see him appear at all for the entire length of the film, at most he flashes for a mere few seconds at a far away cliff. For me, this is the right way to portray such an event. Instead, especially towards the beginning, it is only the repeatedly booming, echoing shot noises that make both the young people and me as the viewer flinch. Rarely have I heard such realistic, terrifying shot noises in a movie. These gunshot sounds replace a direct portrayal of the Utoya July 22nd terrorist, and they are equally ominous. Especially in the first half of the film, the gunfire is accompanied by the young people's (excruciating painful) screams, whimpering, pleading, crying, despair, fear of death. No less than a sonata of horrors that all too often falls silent as soon as another shot is fired and echoes through the trees of the island. 

Just like the hiding teenagers, which behavior equals what we would do in the situation completely, we also wonder why the police, which are getting notified with numerous mobile phones, just won't arrive on the island. Without meaning to, the film has a tension curve here that makes us as observers angry and stunned - the authorities knew what was going on on the island, but they did not appear. Anyone who deals with the case will read that the authorities had great problems organizing a boat or a helicopter when the calls came in, and were rightly criticized for it later. However, that didn’t help the victims anymore.

We accompany Kaja as she looks for her sister in the chaos on the small island, tries to save other children, and finally takes refuge under the cliffs at the water's edge. I found the quiet minutes that we then get with her and another boy in their dialogue very successful in terms of the horror that one has experienced in the last forty minutes with clenched hands over the mouth. Conversations about their own dreams, a little harmless flirtation, a stupid joke. conversations the real young people of Utoya will likely have had while the noises of gunfire echoed across the island. 

Warning, this paragraph is a spoiler - in the end the movie breaks with an expectation that I almost wanted to criticize - that there is a protagonist who is safe. Such a thing didn't exist back then. And so Kaja is also shot in front of our eyes because nobody was safe on Utoya. We see a couple of teenagers being rescued by a boat driver and the movie ends. One of many volunteers who saved young people from the island at the time, and sometimes had to turn them away because their boats were too full. We receive information about the attack before the credits. There is no credit music, instead an ominous, calm flicker and the rush of the water to leave us alone with our thoughts.

This was a movie exactly like it should be about such an event. Bravo. 

There is one thing I had to think about. This horrible event back then shocked me. This movie, it terrified me. A terrible, good film that went through my core. Perhaps more so than one or two films about the Holocaust, the Middle East or September 11th. Here we have the risk of being accused of selective mourning, just like the attacks in Paris in November 2015. More people die every day around the world than in events like this, and you would only care if it happened on your doorstep. Yes and No. The thing is, be it the Holocaust or Syria - we here in Central Europe do not live in this time or in this part of the world. We didn't choose that, but we got it. Today we can no longer imagine that something like the Holocaust could happen again. That seems (luckily) completely impossible and surrealistic. And we don't live in a war zone either, and as terrible as the events in countries like Syria are, they are not here and so they don't affect us in the most literal way. But. The July 22, 2011 attacks took place in Oslo, Norway. In the heart of Europe. Literally IN our front door. Nothing could have prepared Norway or us for it, and it shows us that things like this can happen anywhere, anytime. Just a few hundred kilometers from us, a man killed 77 people. I find it perfectly understandable that we are more shocked, horrified, frightened and affected than tragic deaths in more distant parts of the world or in historical periods.

It is the morbid proximity of Oslo or Paris that makes up the alarming and dismaying effect of such attacks and this film too. 

Anyway, Utoya July 22nd was a really great film. It is informative, it is downright fatalistic and understandable, and it is difficult to bear. I don't want to see it again. But I can absolutely recommend it to anyone who can watch something like this.

8/10 candles for Utoya July 22nd

- Yoraiko