Number 24

Rated TV-MA • Netflix

Forgetting history dooms us to repeat the same mistakes, the saying goes, but does remembering require the disclosure of every painful detail? That’s the central question in Number 24 (or Nr. 24), a new Norwegian film based on the World War II resistance activities of Gunnar Sønsteby, who remains Norway’s most highly decorated citizen. Before an audience of present-day high school students, this national hero (played by Erik Hivju) recounts his part in fighting Nazi occupiers and Norwegian traitors. He delivers an instructive message to the comfortably situated: A few must choose pain and death to secure peace and freedom for all. But with so many devils in the details, an uncomfortable confession emerges.

As Sønsteby begins his talk, he asks the teens, “Do you feel safe?” When they smile and nod their heads affirmatively, he adds, “I also felt safe.” He tells them how as a young man he believed he was living in postwar times. But the 1930s turned out to be an interwar period, he reminds his listeners.

War returns.

Alternating between past and present, most of the film takes place in the five years following Germany’s April 1940 invasion of Norway, which spurs Sønsteby to join the resistance. Tension builds in the film’s two storylines: Nazi and Norwegian authorities hunt Sønsteby’s sabotage-minded “Oslo gang” with fiendish efficiency, and personal questions in the school lecture hall put the elderly Sønsteby on the defensive.

As agent “Number 24,” the young Sønsteby (Sjur Vatne Brean) takes assignments that escalate in risk: publishing an underground newspaper, destroying a recruitment office, and dynamiting a munitions factory. Authorities eventually learn Sønsteby’s the one masterminding Oslo’s resistance operations. Once, when he hands a false identity card to German soldiers on the street, he fingers a grenade in his coat pocket, ready to prevent being captured alive.

Sønsteby’s warcraft takes a turn that will forever haunt him: On orders from his British overseers, Sønsteby’s group begins assassinating Norwegians who are aiding the Nazis. The killings of their fellow countrymen trouble the students, too, particularly one curly-haired girl (Flo Fagerli) who demands an explanation.

“So, you never considered nonviolence?” she asks. “Gandhi?”

“Nonviolence doesn’t work when your country is taken [over] by people who despise humanity,” Sønsteby replies.

Fans of Flame & Citron and Max Manus: Man of War will find that Number 24 adds to the catalog of compelling Scandinavian historical WWII dramas. (Some language and violence, as well as brief frontal male nudity in a torture scene, give the film its TV-MA rating.) A top-notch cast, stunning mountainous and forested snowscapes, and richly decorated sets bolster a nail-biting war story. Era-authentic vehicles, weapons, furniture, and costumes—the attention to detail may be on par for the film industry, but it’s all still visually remarkable.

Sønsteby struggles to share parts of history—and his story—that he’d rather forget. When war is waged on one’s home soil, its consequences inevitably hit close to home.