Paul Greengrass, Auteur of Globalization and Its Discontents
LONDON—On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian who was enraged that his country, as he saw it, was beholden to liberal elites and becoming overrun by Muslims, went on a murderous rampage. He killed eight people with a bomb he planted outside government buildings in Oslo, then slaughtered 69 others, almost all of them teenagers, at a historic Norwegian Labour Party youth retreat on the bucolic island of Utøya west of the Norwegian capital.
The homegrown attack stunned Norway and plunged it into national soul-searching. Breivik’s trial in 2012, at which he was ultimately allowed to take the stand and defended his actions with a long, self-indulgent monologue, became a test case for how democracies respond to terrorism while still upholding the rights that make them democracies. For the British director Paul Greengrass, whose latest film, , dramatizes the attacks and their aftermath with an urgent, understated power, the Breivik killings were more than a one-off; they were a harbinger. (The
