The Good Traitor (2020)
I am sucker for that 16mm look and this film looks absolutely fantastic, which helped me getting a positive impression of this film right from the start. I wasn’t familiar with this part of Danish history during the Nazi occupation, which was really fascinating. We have plenty of Danish films covering the resistance groups, but not that many that ventures into our collaborative government and the dilemmas faced. This focuses on the American ambassador and how he basically went rogue, so we don’t get much from the Copenhagen side of things. I think some nuance is lost in that decision, as he is portrayed mostly one-sided as a hero. I can’t judge how historically accurate that is though. Suffice to say, it is by all measures a very engaging narrative and Ulrich Thomsen plays his part very convincingly. The parts that work less well the depiction of his less than successful marriage, which does serve to give the character some nuance with some “scratches in the pain”, but it is not nearly as interesting or fleshed out as the much better political stuff.
Rating: 4