The Swedish Connection

CinemaSerf

Not long after the start of WWII, the neutral Swedish relationship with the Third Reich was precarious and they were extremely conscious that risking their ire was fraught with danger. Meantime, though, across the border in newly occupied Norway the Jewish population were beginning to be ostracised and shipped off to the labour camps of the Fatherland. The Government are aware that some of these people may have legitimate Swedish citizenship, but given the prevailing winds blowing feel they cannot rock that boat too vigorously - so they pass the buck down their administrative food chain onto the head of the their legal affairs team in the Foreign Office. Gösta Engzell (Henrik Dorsin) is your archetypal civil servant whom his bosses hope will just go through the motions, but as information reaches him of more and more atrocities, he decides that there might be a way to issues visas to many at risk of persecution. Initially he limits the activities of his not all entirely convinced staff to specialist cases - like a pair of twin boys; but gradually he expands this operation until it begins to annoy the Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann (Joshua Seelenbinder) and so becomes an issue for his boss Söderström (Jonas Karlsson) and the upper echelons of government. Can they dissuade him from pursuing his mission or are they going to have to relocate him - and his wife - to their embassy in Moscow? There is something jovially avuncular about Dorsin's depiction of the increasingly determined Engzell and that performance goes some way to illustrating that there were more ways than one to take on their enemy without an head-on confrontation. It's still a very dangerous line to take, though, and through characters like Söderström and even the Foreign Minister himself, we also swiftly realise that personal concerns had to be weighed against those of a nation ill-equipped to take on the might of their neighbours across the Baltic. This is a characterfully engaging wartime adventure, more cerebral in nature, with a little dark humour included to help diffuse what is an obvious depiction of menace and threat by the goose-steppers whose obsession with eliminating the Jews is writ large here, too.