The terrorist attack of 22 July 2011 is recreated in meticulous detail by focusing on people’s reactions to the horror rather than explaining the inexplicable.
Norway
4*
Director:
Erik Poppe
Screenwriter:
Erik Poppe
Director of Photography:
Martin Otterbeck
Running time: 90 minutes
Original title: Utøya 22. juli
There is nothing to be done, because all of it has already happened. But for nearly 90 unbroken minutes, we accompany one girl as she flees the attack, hides from the gunfire and struggles to understand what has happened in this idyllic outpost in the Norwegian countryside. This is a depiction of the terror inflicted on a group of youths in July 2011 on the island of Utøya.
Director Erik Poppe’s brave decision to centre his entire film on one character is, without a doubt, the best possible choice he could have made. Not only does it keep the viewer in the dark about the full extent of the carnage, thus keeping us in suspense throughout, but it also anchors the emotions in one place instead of weaving a necessarily incomplete tapestry of various strands. In the film’s opening moments, following an incongruous sequence in the capital where a bomb has exploded, Kaia (Andrea Berntzen), right on the cusp of becoming an adult, looks straight into the camera and says, “You’ll never understand.” It turns out she has an earpiece and is speaking on the phone to her mother, who has called to inquire about her following the explosion in Oslo.
From this moment on, we follow Kaia wherever she goes, though at a slightly less intimate distance than Mátyás Erdély’s camera in the similarly lensed Son of Saul. She has recently fallen out with her younger sister, who made slightly inconsiderate comments in front of their fellow campers, which Kaia considered inappropriate. Thus, they get separated early on, and within a few moments, youths are rushing from the forest as shots ring out.
What follows is persistent confusion about the source of the attack, about whether it is even an attack, about what measures should be taken to elude the gunman and about how much longer this will take. Unlike a conventional work of fiction, there are no clear leaders, and even the villain is a big unknown, as we barely catch of a glimpse of him, with two or three chilling exceptions.
For 72 minutes, the actual length of the attack in 2011, we hear the bone-chilling shots on the soundtrack – sometimes farther away and seemingly duller, at other times up close with booms loudly reverberating enough to shake us in our seats. This is the music of the film, which doesn’t have a musical score and thus relies on the diegetic sound to provide it with the relevant soundscape.
In the foreground, Kaia is trying to deal with something she never expected she would face. After all, this is the calm, peaceful Norwegian countryside, not an American school. We already catch a glimpse of this distance from danger in the first few minutes, when there is some very superficial discussion about the bombing in Oslo. The only person who seems to be clued into the danger of what is going on is Issa (Sorosh Sadat), whose background makes him more sensitive to how others’ actions will shape people’s perception of him.
In retrospect, the Oslo-set opening sequence is wholly at odds with the rest of the film. Geographically, it is separate from the bulk of the film, which takes place on the island of Utøya. Temporally, it takes place a mere two hours before the events on the island but is shown almost exclusively through documentary (including surveillance) footage. Most importantly, however, it is not presented from Kaia’s perspective. Thus, we have two distinct sections in the film, even though both were the result of actions by the same man: the far-right terrorist, who luckily goes unnamed here, with even the actor uncredited. But the film would have been much better had it limited itself to the island. In that way, we would have learned about the bombing in Oslo the same way the children do: from each other, with much remaining opaque.
There is nothing exceptional about Kaia, and that is good. She is not immediately concerned with locating her sister because the adrenaline has overwhelmed her. Her efforts to save her sister and others are not heroic nor complicated: She does what she knows, but she knows as little as everyone else and is mostly functioning on a primal desire for survival by playing a potentially fatal real-life version of hide and seek.
Because we experience the story from Kaia’s perspective, we know almost nothing of the situation in general, except that people are in danger. We see them running, trying to get away; we see them after they have been shot; we see them dying; and we see them when they are already dead. As time passes, the body count increases, and we slowly the gravity of the invisible but very audible danger. Of course, this tight focus poses the director numerous dramatic challenges, including how to keep the story as realistic as possible and not inject unnecessary fictional drama or sugar into the mix.
Poppe appears to take the gamble late in the film that his apparent single-take staging absolves him of criticism that the narrative takes a melodramatic turn, but because of the focus on the single character, it is hard not to take notice. Hiding out with Magnus (Aleksander Holmen), a boy from the west coast city of Stavanger who openly admits the youth camp piqued his interest not because of the politics but because of the potential to meet girls, Kaia strikes up a cute conversation with him that sets up an emotionally manipulative ending to the film. The camera work is very well executed and whatever cuts there are invisible to the naked eye.
This is an ambitious and at times visceral, though not entirely successful, dramatisation of events on that tragic day in July 2011. The direction sometimes draws attention to itself, and beyond Kaia, her unanswered phone calls to her sister and the desperate phone calls between her and her mother, the film doesn’t offer much in the way of characterisation. It emphasises the confusion among the young people by having them ask the same questions over and over again – a natural and entirely logical response to this wholly unnatural event – but, except for the opening minutes, there is little chemistry between the characters, and it feels like a staged 72 minutes of tension rather than an ordeal filled with flesh-and-bone human beings.
That being said, this is a remarkable story told in a fresh way that makes the experience an unforgettable one. But if the director had spent as much time on developing his characters as he clearly did on blocking his actors, this could have been an extraordinary film.
Viewed at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.