Scandinavian Film Fest 2025 Review - Number 24
Images courtesy of the Scandinavian Film Festival.
What is freedom worth?
Multi-award-winning director John Andreas Andersen’s (The Quake, 2018) latest Norwegian language biographical spy drama Number 24 explores the life of resistance hero Gunnar Sønsteby during the German Occupation of Norway. Dramatising several of the Resistance fighters’s sabotage operations and eventual assassinations during World War Two, the feature explores the question of what one can and should sacrifice for the chance at freedom. Number 24 is a heart-touching and thought-provoking exploration of the consequences of war, and ultimately philosophical in a quintessentially Nordic way.
Andersen sets the somber tone of the film early by opening up to a scene of the young Sønsteby (Sjur Vatne Brean) enjoying a day out in the fjords with his close childhood friend Erling Solheim (Jakob Maanum Trulsen). Their innocent outing foreshadows the coming conflict as Solheim defends imprisoning communists, while Sønsteby is horrified by the prospect of imprisoning people for their beliefs, highlighting their ideological divide and the subsequent roles they will come to play. The film then cuts to elderly Sønsteby (Erik Hivju) as he prepares to give a speech about his wartime experience at a local university. The film continues to weave between these two storylines, allowing the audience to truly connect with the two Sønstebys as they repeatedly live out the darkest time of their life. As Sønsteby reiterates throughout the film, there are five drawers in his mind: the top three he keeps open at all times, the fourth he opens occasionally and the fifth he has not opened since May 8th 1945, the day WWII ended in Norway.
Sjur Vatne Brean steals the screen as the young Sønsteby, playing him with a quiet intensity that’s both stoic and deeply human. His performance is an exercise in restraint, a stone-faced resistance leader who cannot afford to feel, who attributes his survival and successfully completed missions to a mix of luck and careful planning. Brean masterfully reveals this containment through his eyes and body language, the parts of himself that let slip the true man behind the disguise.
This powerful performance of emotional minimalism fits perfectly within the film’s overall understated tone. It highlights Sønsteby’s humble origins, as a totally unprepared accountant thrust into disorganised missions with little to no direction, to his evolution into a pragmatic leader defined by his ability to compartmentalise his emotions and adapt to every situation. The film deliberately avoids sensationalism. It doesn’t rely on special effects or over-the-top espionage missions. There’s no superhero gunning down one hundred Nazis with endless machine guns and explosions for pure entertainment value - instead, the focus is on ordinary people, and the harrowing decisions they must face in the fog of war and how those decisions will be remembered in times of peace.
Unfortunately, I am no expert on Gunnar Sønsteby, so I cannot speak to the full accuracy of his adaptation. While some aspects may be slightly exaggerated, from what I’ve read, it appears to be a mostly faithful, and, most importantly, respectful portrayal of his life and his post-war advocacy for the ethical and personal cost of war, which will hopefully help his message to reach a wider international audience amid today’s political environment.
So if you’re into Norwegian history, philosophical discussions about killing for the greater good, absolutely heart-wrenching endings, surprise friendship tales, and Nazis being murdered then Number 24 is the film for you. Now screening at the Hurtigruten Scandinavian Film Festival.
4.5 out of 5 stars
Number 24 is screening as part of the 2025 Scandinavian Film Festival, running from July 11th to August 3rd. For tickets and more info, click here.