After a double prologue (Wallenberg sees German atrocity from a train, Wallenberg gets a Budapest assignment), this sturdy bio-pic on the unfathomable Swedish mediocrity who saved 100s of thousands of Hungarian Jews from both Nazi & local Fascist forces, jumps right to the end of the story, bypassing the personal growth & organization building tropes you’d expect. Instead we cover Wallenberg’s two day slog to halt the Ghetto’s annihilation (macro work) and the murder of a small group of Jews stranded in the middle of the city (micro work). His mixed results let us see how he bought, bribed, tricked & bullied his way around genocidal insanity. Now at his triumph, he disappears with the conquering Soviet forces, never to be seen again. Stellan Skarsgard could hardly be bettered in the lead, and if writer/director Kjell Grede is more dogged than inspired, he lets the story and his compelling characters do most of the work with an unforced honest decency not always found in Holocaust-themed films.
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