Critic Reviews

Poppe’s way into the story – spending every second with one young woman as she navigates the carnage – is a moving testimony to the simple heroism that such events bring to the surface. Ultimately, it’s an homage to the very generation of young Norwegians who Breivik wanted to obliterate.

This grueling, pulsating, in-your-face film–almost to a fault–has ferocious power, but it’s going to divide like a fissure.

The film has the power to make our bodies catch up with our hearts — the power to help us safely experience the kind of terror we need to remember in a way that makes it impossible for us to forget.

It is an absorbing and moving tribute to the courage of the young victims of Utøya.

U – July 22 is designed to be as immersive as it is exhausting, and largely succeeds.

For this critic, the events in the home stretch finally feel too much like concessions to the necessities of the laws of fictional drama, with first an unexpected twist followed by a melodramatic one.

This harrowing retelling of Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack on the island of Utøya is less exploitative than Paul Greengrass’s brutal, Netflix-bound, English-language version, but the question remains: does a tragedy have to be turned into cinema for people to engage with it?