The Swedish Connection review – uplifting real life tale of Stockholm bureaucrat who outwits the Nazis

2026-02-10 - 09:15

A genial, lightly comic portrait of Gösta Engzell, the unlikely civil servant who outmanoeuvred Nazi bureaucracy with paperwork ‘It’s a miracle!” exclaims a Swedish official. No, he is corrected by a beaming colleague: “It’s bureaucracy.” This is a man whose diplomatic pincer skills have just stuck it to the Nazi hate machine and will save tens of thousands of Jewish lives. His name is Gösta Engzell, a real-life bureaucrat in the Swedish foreign ministry during the second world war, played here by Henrik Dorsin as bumbling and avuncular in his comfy cardigans and dicky bow ties. If we are honest, Engzell’s desk-based heroism – deploying the power of loopholes, paperwork and diplomatic notes verbales – to save lives is not terribly cinematic. Co-directors Thérèse Ahlbeck and Marcus Olsson’s workaround is to give us shots of diplomats dashing along the corridors of power, huffing and puffing; it all adds to the film’s affable comic mood, pleasant enough but sometimes jarring with the seriousness of what is at stake. Continue reading...