U‑July 22 – first look review

Mak­ing a film based on a real-life tragedy is an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult thing to do well. While it’s embed­ded in human nature to attempt to find order in chaos, there’s always the poten­tial for art about the sense­less wast­ing of life to feel par­a­sitic and voyeuris­tic. Erik Poppe, in fic­tion­al­is­ing the mass shoot­ing of Nor­we­gian teenagers at a sum­mer camp, attempts to tread the del­i­cate line between exploitive and nec­es­sary film­mak­ing. He doesn’t always man­age to do so well.

It is a film that will undoubt­ed­ly spark a debate about whether or not it is nec­es­sary to replay tragedy on the screen quite so vivid­ly – com­ing only a few days after anoth­er mass shoot­ing in the US, one ques­tions whether we need a fic­tion­alised reminder when the real­i­ty is vis­i­ble on every news screen. It’s dif­fi­cult to tell who Poppe’s audi­ence is, as many will remem­ber the vivid news reports from the sum­mer of 2011, and the images of shoot­er Anders Breivik on tri­al that fol­lowed in the aftermath.

To his cred­it, Poppe does a decent job of not mak­ing the film about the per­pe­tra­tor. The sto­ry cen­tres com­plete­ly on Kaja, a teenag­er with polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions attend­ing the Utoya sum­mer camp with her younger sis­ter. Open­ing with the Oslo bomb attack that pre­ced­ed the Utoya shoot­ings, there’s an impend­ing sense of dread right from the start, but even know­ing what’s yet to come, the sound of the first shots ring­ing out is still enough to make your blood run cold.

But we’ve seen it all before – in Gus Van Sant’s Ele­phant, made in the after­math of the 1999 Columbine High School Mas­sacre. The same over-the-shoul­der track­ing shots reap­pear in Utoya, and the same incon­se­quen­tial details of ado­les­cence reveal our frailty as human beings. The one-shot take and run­time the same length as the actu­al shoot­ing make it feel inter­est­ing, but unfor­tu­nate­ly there are also a cou­ple of over­wrought clichés which deval­ue any impact the film might have.

It’s clear that wounds the events of Utoya have cre­at­ed in Nor­we­gian cul­ture run deep, and the film is aid­ed by a strong per­for­mance lead from Andrea Berntzen. But Poppe’s deci­sion to remove pol­i­tics from a sto­ry entire­ly moti­vat­ed by the polit­i­cal lean­ings of a far-right extrem­ist don’t sit right – the end result is a har­row­ing hor­ror film more than any­thing else. You gain only a sense for the sense­less­ness of it all, and for many, it’s not nec­es­sary to watch a film to under­stand that.