This uncompromising Norwegian drama is set on the island prison of Bastoy in the Oslo fjord and is based on a true story. The English title alludes to another story of escape from a more famous island prison but there is nothing heroic about Marius Holst's picture. This is a brutal and soul-destroying place and the film is bleakly and brilliantly filmed and very well played by its almost exclusively male cast, (Benjamin Helstad and Trond Nilssen are outstanding as two of the incarcerated boys as is Stellan Starsgard as the misguided governor). File it next to the likes of "Escape from Alcatraz" if you will but this is much more Bressonian than that.

This is a solid drama about true events that happened in a working and correction camp of young criminals on a lost island of Norway. The story tells the acts of rebellion, vengeance and escape of young males in 1915 when a paedophile supervisor comes back to the camp after an incident that the camp directions officially ignores because the supervisor holds evidences of bribery against them and uses them to not be betrayed or send home for his unspeakable acts.The movie is quite touching and authentic. The acting is very good and the events are intriguing enough to entertain you for around two hours. Especially the ending is dramatic, tragic and truly gripping. The locations, the grey but exotic locations and the use of light techniques and camera angles create a blackened mood and make this flick a mixture of a drama and something like a film noir which is rather intriguing.On the other side, the story offers nothing new or surprising and I have seen better and more intense prison movies in the last years. This kind of film could have hit harder two decades ago or so but nowadays the topic feels a little bit worn out. The movie also takes too much time to kick off and has a couple of lengths at some points. The movie could have also explained what happened to the island and its horrible institution after the tragic events of 1915 and the ending leaves us a little bit unsatisfied for this reason.In the end, this movie is a solid and interesting flick. It's nothing spectacular but surely worth your attention if you stumble over this or if this movie will be released in the cinemas or video shops of your country during the next months. Let's conclude that the atmosphere and the acting are the strong points in here in comparison to the slow paced and rather mediocre story which is the weak point in here.

This is a very solid film. I do not understand why one of the other reviewers felt the boys were not sympathetic. Only one of the kids appears to have committed a serious crime. The others are there for petty things like stealing change from a church collection basket. That said, as good as the film is, it is not clear how much of it is really history, and how much just conjecture. I've read elsewhere that the only part of the film that is known to be true is that there was a revolt and that soldiers responded from the mainland (one of only two times the Norwegian government has trained its guns on its own citizens). The reasons behind the revolt are said to be mere conjecture.

Kongen av Bastøy is based on actual events happening on the Bastøy correctional facility for difficult boys, back in 1915. The Norwegian island Bastøy is located in the Oslo fjord, between Horten and Moss, about an hours drive south of Norway's capitol, what until 1919 was called Christiania before changing name back to original Oslo.Marius Holst has made another good film about young boys coping with coming of age. This time he has gone to the core of coping with misplaced childhoods. Well acted, and very true to it's time frame, Kongen of Bastøy, is very believable story made with a 10 million dollar budget. Stellan Skarsgård, Kristoffer Joner, Benjamin Helstad and Trond Nilssen does the very best of method acting of their characters.The story is both sore, dramatic and tragic, as well as true. It tries to both tell Norwegian history back when the country was poor, and when it was likely to be sent on a whaling ship, being a youngster from difficult background. So why is this film not a 10 out of 10. so many of these heart-wrenching stories easily make you get tears in your eyes.Well, I'm afraid to say that this is a true story's dilemma. Making the best possible story come out in a film, you have to love of eel for the characters. The young boys on this facility is not the ones easy to love. They are brutal, uneducated, cheeky, unable to show affection and victims of a difficult past. Though Marius Holst tries to make us understand and feel affection for both the kids and the "wardens" in this boys home, I simply can't really start to like any of the characters.Well acted, well written, but does director Holst really make us care? He has shown he know how to do this in the great story of "Cross my heart and hope to die", In Norwegian: "Ti kniver i hjertet" and "Mirsush" or "Blodsbånd", and succeeded well there. In Kongen av Bastøy which is a story of 10 years in progress, the trouble is that he had to face reality.Telling a story on difficult boys, obviously has to show the boys how they are. And Marius Holst is no "tears-seeker". Neither is his leading actor in this. He obviously has felt this story has to be told. And as a historic manuscript on how one solved this cases of difficult boys back then, it functions very well. Just don't expect to really care. Maybe this makes the film even better. It should, but I'm afraid I still feel it lacks this. To really be able to touch a movie-goer, the fictional adding would have done the trick. making the film an even better story, but less true. That's the dilemma of telling a true story. If you want the story to be loved, you gotta add the elements of heart and soul, even if it would be untrue to the story told.So for this cold bastard, I'm afraid this is just a good told story, and not a classic as I'd like it to be, and maybe also therefore not the possible box office hit it would have been, if made as a heart wrenching story.Making a film like this loved, really need us to identify. This is the only true trouble with an otherwise great film.Bastøy correctional facility was closed down in the fifties, when Norway was recovering from the 2nd World war. Now there's a prison out there. I'm sure a lot of kids was growing up hating Bastøy. Bastøy still have a negative sound for Norwegians, well deserved.