22 July review – Paul Greengrass's harrowing account of Anders Breivik's mass murder

Drama and journalism meet in this brave and masterly film about the 2011 massacre of 77 people in Norway by a smirking, far-right extremist

‘Welcome,” reads the banner on the Norwegian island of Utøya, early in the new film directed and co-produced by Paul Greengrass. The kids are already arriving, a blur of happy faces, here for the Norwegian Labour party’s annual youth summer camp. Badly assembled tents and games of frisbee ensue. More than two hours later, the credits will roll. You may find you stay until they end, still needing a second or two to put yourself back together.

22 July is Greengrass’s account of the 2011 massacre on Utøya of 69 people, most of them teenagers, by the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (who had already killed eight people earlier in the day with a car bomb in Oslo). The result is searing. In his last film, Jason Bourne, Greengrass revived the character whose action adventures have filled half his career. This is the other half – the junction of film and journalism, drama and the record.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Cu8Gem