One Life at the London Film Festival: If you don’t cry at this beautiful tribute you need medical help

Could this film bring Sir Anthony Hopkins his third Academy Award, lifting him out of the densely populated people-with-two-Oscars bracket and into the exalted company of the Streeps and the Nicholsons and the Day-Lewises?

In the end Cillian Murphy’s prestige-y, serious-y, cigarette-y, weight loss-y turn as Robert J Oppenheimer will most likely thwart him. And it won’t help that One Life does, with its syrupy strings and somewhat grey palette, undeniably have more than a hint of BBC TV drama about it.

But by God this is a superb performance: one in which Hopkins, as Nicholas Winton, imbues every frame he is in with warmth and wit and sadness and charming British eccentricity. He switches effortlessly between moments of genuine, laugh-out-loud levity (including a wonderful use of ‘twit’ when describing a newspaper editor) and what are by far the most moving scenes in any film this year. Honestly, anyone who doesn’t blub their way through the entire last half an hour should be checked for a pulse on the way out.

It helps that the story is such a remarkable one: Nicholas Winton was a well-to-do stockbroker who, at the start of the Second World War, is so horrified by unfolding events that he heads off to Prague to do something, anything, he can to help the terrified young refugees fleeing Hitler. People – including his mother, played by Helena Bonham-Carter – think he is crazy. But he somehow manages to organise visa and trains and get hundreds of them to safety in the UK; what has since become known as the Kindertransport.

Then in 1988 as an old man, he is reunited with many of the people whose lives he saved on an episode of That’s Life, where they get to finally thank him for all that he did. Winton was sometimes called the British Oskar Schindler, and the parallels go beyond their acts of extreme kindness: both men were completely consumed by the task they undertook and never able to focus on the people that they did save, only those that they failed to save.

Johnny Flynn is great as the younger Winton, weaving his way through frenetic, terrifying scenes of the actual evacuations. Yet even though he and Hopkins share the film’s running time almost equally, it is the latter’s scenes that cut deepest and which will live longest in the memory of everyone who sees them. It is, unquestionably, Hopkins’s film.

And of course it is also one that, with all that is happening in Israel and Palestine, now has added resonance: a reminder that, as leaders of regimes launch threats and missiles at each other, it is innocent people – and often innocent and very young people – that will pay the prince.

One can only pray that there are more Nicholas Wintons in the world right now, desperately doing anything they can to get them to safety, performing similar acts of madness-slash-kindness that the world probably won’t know about for a long time. And hope that when their stories are discovered, films as beautiful as this one are made about them.

One Life screens at the BFI London Film Festival on Friday October 13 and Sunday October 15; bfi.org.uk/lff. It is released in the UK on January 5, 2024