It seems strange that an actor of Anthony Hopkins’ prestige and acclaim would need a comeback so late in his career but for a few years, the Oscar-winner was stuck in a cycle of thankless sequel paycheques and one-word thrillers where the “and” credit was starting to lose its lustre (Collide! Solace! Misconduct! Blackway!). Within the space of a year he was then Oscar nominated for The Two Popes and won for The Father (his first Academy attention since 1998) and while it didn’t exactly curb his predilection for B-movies completely (in 2021 he started in Zero Contact, the first film to be released by an NFT platform), it did edge him back toward substance, with a subtle yet scene-devouring turn in James Gray’s Armageddon Time and now, another knockout performance in the second world war drama One Life.
The film might, at times, feel more like a BBC TV drama (it does come from BBC Films among others) with some pedestrian film-making touches but it builds towards a last act of towering emotion, with few dry eyes at its Toronto film festival premiere. It’s a story of radical bravery, of Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker gripped by a need to do something as Europe neared the start of the second world war. He headed to Prague in 1938, despite the cautions of his well-intentioned mother, and found himself immediately horrified by the situation so many of the young refugees were in, most unlikely to survive the winter. His plan to save them was dismissed as naive by those more hardened by what they had seen and what they had found not to be possible but he returned to London determined to help and with the assistance of his equally dogged mother, he started gathering visas and finding homes.
