Erik Poppe’s Utøya July 22 is a visceral, brutal, yet heartfelt and earnest movie, which imbibes the innocent bewilderment and horror of its young characters. On one unbroken camera take, it seeks to recreate the horrific mass murder of 69 defenceless teenagers in Norway in 2011 at a socialist youth summer camp at Utøya island outside Oslo. The heavily armed killer was a rightwing race-hate terrorist who had detonated a bomb in Oslo itself earlier in the day.



This slaughter was arguably the biggest trauma to have hit Norway since the second world war; the Utøya massacre (happening as it did in a closely regulated progressive European country) is also often adduced by America’s NRA as evidence that gun control laws are beside the point. It was, however, a single incident: quite distinct from what is now the single rolling, continuous mass phenomenon of school shootings now in progress in the US.

Poppe’s camera situates itself among the nervous teens at the camp just by a forest and a lake – nervous, because they have just heard about the Oslo bombing and are earnestly discussing it. They are not, in fact, like those eerily unaware future victims of Paul Greengrass’s 9/11 drama United 93 or Gus Van Sant’s school shooting nightmare Elephant whose ordinary lives we see blankly unfolding at first as the calamity draws invisibly closer.



Kaja (Andrea Berntzen) is a smart young 19-year-old, disturbed at the Oslo bomb, and annoyed at the tactless, insensitively carefree behaviour of her sister Emilie (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osbourne), with whom she has a painful row. Petter (Brede Fristad) is an annoying guy who likes needling Kaja on political issues. He clearly has a crush on her, as does the dopey Magnus (Aleksander Holmen). Meanwhile, a young person of colour, Issa (Sorosh Sadat), is praying that the terror attack they have all heard about is not the work of an Islamist jihadist, which would increase the racism he faces from day to day. So these are the regular travails faced by ordinary teens – though coloured by anxiety.



And then they hear gunshots in the forest; their terrified friends come running blindly out of the woodland and the sickening nightmare begins.



Perhaps nothing in the film quite matches the coup de cinéma at the very beginning. Looking directly into the camera, and with a weirdly blank expression on her face, Kaja says: “You’ll never understand.” Has she, at that moment, intuited the affectless, dead-eyed unconcern of The killer himself? In the next moment, the explanation is revealed; but this is the nearest the film gets to a Haneke-esque callousness.



The camera stays with Kaja throughout; she sometimes cowers and hides with friends, she sometimes goes off on her own, searching for Emilie. The dull gunfire echoes in the distance, along with the screaming – and occasionally we glimpse the terrorist’s chilling silhouette on the horizon.



Staying with Kaja has its advantages and disadvantages. This way, Poppe allows us to feel the horror-struck isolation and tension, he invites us to make an emotional investment in Kaja and feel her dilemma: is trying to hide a good idea or not? Does staying in one place make it likelier that the killer will eventually find you?



But it also occasionally makes for a slightly static film. Sebastian Schipper’s one-take thriller Victoria (2015), by contrast, followed the active participants and made it a thrill-ride and put you at the centre of the action. It would be theoretically possible to play this film from the killer’s viewpoint, a crazed version of Call of Duty, though such an approach would be crass in this case, and Poppe is right to avoid it - though the imperative to proceed with moral seriousness as befits an event which is still a live issue perhaps inhibits Poppe a little.



Occasionally this feels oddly like an old-fashioned war film, as Magnus and Kaja start talking about what they’ll do if they get home alive. At other times, it can’t help looking queasily like a YA post-apocalyptic dystopia, with Kaja a real-life Katniss Everdeen. There are also ironic echoes of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale.



And after 72 minutes – the length of the ordeal in real life – the gut wrenching action of the film is at an end. It feels simultaneously much shorter and much longer than 72 minutes. It is an absorbing and moving tribute to the courage of the young victims of Utøya.





