Berlin Film Review: ‘U – July 22’

Inasmuch as there could ever be a good time to premiere a film about the 2011 Utøya massacre, “U – July 22” arrives at a particularly tender, difficult moment.

Unspooling at the Berlin Film Festival five days after the Parkland mass shooting in Florida, Erik Poppe’s appropriately agonizing single-take reconstruction of the right-wing terrorist attack that left 69 dead at a political youth camp on a Norwegian island will prompt particularly heated debate as to the ethics and ultimate value of recreating contemporary tragedy as an exercise in cinematic tension.

There’s little arguing with the technical agility and brute impact of Poppe’s film, however, which also makes the prudent choice of maintaining the victims’ perspective — fictionalized, but drawn from survivors’ accounts — to the end, while the shooter, Anders Behring Breivik, is barely glimpsed on screen.If “U – July 22” avoids some of the grisliest pitfalls of such dramatization, however, those concessions won’t settle the more complicated question of whether

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