Number 24

Norway is under occupation. A young man joins the resistance, works in sabotage, and stays uncaught through the war by changing identity again and again. The Gestapo is looking for him without knowing who he is. The film tells that story alongside a talk the man gives to students at a school many years later. The subject is not heroism but why the young people listening should care about what the old man is telling them. The classroom sections are the film's frame, and the questions asked there set its political centre; the war sequences arrive as answers to them. The form separates the two times sharply. The forties are cold and tense, the classroom passages calm and ordinary. The sabotage is shot without display; the explosions are small and the escapes tedious and plausible. The source is real: the man is one of the best-known figures of the Norwegian resistance and the country's most decorated civilian. His code name is the film's title. It reached a wide audience through Netflix. John Andreas Andersen directs. Sjur Vatne Brean plays him young and Erik Hivju plays him old. Who it is for: viewers who like Second World War resistance stories. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a complicated view; the film does not question its hero and the telling is largely a tribute.