Svik

Betrayal (Svik) could have been an important movie about Nazi-collaborators in Norway during the first world war, and the film wants to focus on some important matters regarding Norways biggest industrial company making aluminum at Herøya factories during the war.

But the film manages to make this a complete mess. The script could easily have told what is going on, but it takes more than an hour to understand what the point of the story is. And even then you might lose it.

The actors does an OK job, but also here's trouble. It seems like the seriousness of the story goes to their head and into their acting. We tend to find the characters interesting, until we later really don't care what will happen. None of them is lovable, which is a problem in a film with a question of taking sides and understanding the actions.

The film is beautifully shot, and the historical backgrounds are flawless, except a strange opening scene over a London war time sky. In Oslo and Herøya, as well as at the Swedish border everything functions.

It's such a pity they couldn't throw away the script, making it clearer and better. Even Lene Nystrøm (of Aqua) would have come out a better actress that way. She does fair, especially when on stage singing out German "lieder".

There where great expectations to this, after the great film "Max Manus", but I'm sorry to say this is a long step back from that war time story. With a better script this could have been a 7 out of 10. The 3 out of 10 is for good intentions, and great wartime coloring, as well as the cast trying to make us interested, as well as the importance of this story - if only someone had told it understandable.