A very good movie

When I heard that my uncle wanted to watch a movie about the tragedy in Utøya, I thought he meant the movie '22 July' directed by Paul Greengrass also coming out this year. Anyway, it doesn't really matter since it was such a powerful movie and easily one of the best I have seen this year. In my opinion, the greatest success of this movie was to show not only that the guy shot more than 170 people but, above all, the impact on the 300 remaining survivors who will be psychologically traumatised maybe forever. Indeed, for more than an hour, they have nowhere to hide, they have no idea about what is really going on, who is attacking them and why, and if someone will finally show up to stop this nightmare. In the mean time, the shooting keeps going on and they do see other survivors running around scared shitless and they do hear other people screaming so it was a real nightmare and that's why the one-take gimmick really worked. Indeed, this way, there was no break to allow the viewers to breath for a moment and, this way, not only you're on the first line but you get eventually completely sucked in this tragedy. To be honest, I do think that the main character was slightly too heroic for my taste and I would have rather had an average teenager but I do understand that they needed someone  who was brave enough to do something otherwise the whole thing would have been about someone hiding behind a tree. Concerning the one-take approach, it did work but, at the end of the day, nothing much really happened and, in the same genre, I preferred 'Victoria' which was just quite mind blowing. Anyway, to conclude, the whole thing was just really heartbreaking and terrifying at the same time but I think it is definitely worth a look.

8/10