The Tofte family is the subject of Narvik. In the neutrality guard, Gunnar (Carl Martin Eggesbo) is a corporal. At a guesthouse in Narvik where negotiations between British and German diplomats fail, Ingrid (Kristine Hartgen) works. Ole (Christoph Gelfert Mathiesen), a young kid, lives with them. Gunnar's father Aslak (Stig Henrik Hoff) assists in caring for him.

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As Gunnar begs for a few hours of leave so that he can give Ole a toy train for his birthday, the Toftes appear. When Gunnar and Ingrid hear explosions near the sea, they are essentially still in the refractory phase. Narvik is seized by German soldiers. Gunnar follows his unit, whose mission is to blow up a crucial railroad bridge. German Konsul Fritz Wussow (Christoph Bach) tells Ingrid to remain at the hotel. She is a valuable translator and speaks German, English, and Norwegian. The Norwegian soldiers successfully destroy the bridge. But while Ingrid watches in fear as Gunnar becomes a prisoner, the bridge remains standing.

Ingrid is in between a rock and a hard place. She is unsure about her husband's status and had the impression that Konsul Fritz likes her and makes every effort to protect Ole. Also, she assists the British diplomats in fleeing the hotel and making their way to a house in the woods. They essentially scare her into providing them with information so they may tactically direct their forces to regain Narvik. Tragically, British shells strike the village without ever distinguishing between German combatants and civilians as she did. Narvik—is that her tale? The movie reunites us with Gunnar, whose bone-deep weary expression and filthy, chapped face suggest that being a POW under German supervision is miserable, just wretched before we get another sequence of title cards explaining what transpires in the ensuing weeks.

It's a terrible experience for Gunnar. The content is typically PG-13, so don't anticipate the horrifying realistic violence we typically see in war movies. Narvik does a respectable job of handling its roughly parallel narratives, which are split roughly 60-40 between Ingrid and Gunnar. The former is significantly more thematically complex. It tells the tale of a woman fighting a silent battle to protect her family while constantly grappling with the cognitive dissonance of opposing ideologies. She is aware that her life-or-death choices put her in the crosshairs of criticism from one group of people and the threat of being shot by the fascist group of people.

Ingrid's circumstance is intriguing. But the movie only barely scratches the surface of her moral dilemma that won't stop dipping into Gunnar's situation's more formulaic war movie tropes. With the assistance of other military friends who have no personality or character, he shoots, scampers, takes fire, flees, recovers his resolve, destroys a machine gun nest, and does all of that while being with them. While doing so, Skjoldbjaerg directs action and dialogue scenes with the steady, dependable eyes and hands of a seasoned director, despite the fact that one can tell he is struggling with the disjointed story.

Ingrid represents the psychological conflict of the German occupation, and Gunnar the physical difficulty. Guess which one feels like it should have been the film's main focus and is more dramatic? Yes, it's not the same old patriotic and violent manly exhibition. His predicament becomes more difficult in a last-minute plot device that wouldn't be necessary if the characters got to express their emotional and logical quandaries without pausing so frequently to provide context via title cards, which slows down the dramatic pacing of the story. But Ingrid's situation gives the film just enough dimension to make us care about how it turns out.

Narvik is now available for streaming on Netflix.