An Excruciatingly Realistic Account of A Terrorist Attack
Movie
Norway
Norwegian
Drama, History
2018
ERIK POPPE
Ada Eide, Aleksander Holmen, Andrea Berntzen
92 min
What it's about
The movie tells the story about a girl who has to hide and survive from a right wing terrorist while looking for her little sister during the terrorist attacks in Norway on the island Utøya, July 22nd.
The take
This movie is different from a Netflix release about the same events. Actually, it's different from any movie you've probably seen before. Depicting the terrorist attack that took 77 lives in 2011 in an island near Oslo, Norway, it's made to make you feel as if you were part of the attack. It's shot to resemble one take, and the time of the movie is the time it took the attack to unfold (so you're witnessing it in real-time). While closely based on the accounts of two survivors, it follows a fictional character called Kaja who looks for her sister during the attacks. Utøya: July 22 pushes the limits of what you can watch in a movie but serves as a terrifying testament to the atrocity of a terrorist attack of such nature.