The morality of murder and torture are front and centre in 13 MINUTES, the story of Georg Elser, a man who could have changed world history and saved millions of human lives. With 13 minutes more, the bomb he had personally assembled would have torn apart Adolph Hitler and his henchmen.
This, however, was not to be, and on 8 November 1939, Hitler left the scene of the attempted assassination 13 minutes earlier than expected leaving Elser to fail catastrophically, killing innocent people like waitresses and musicians instead of the Fuhrer.
The cocksure clockmaker was captured over the incident and while he is being interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo his life flashes before him. 13 MINUTES relates the background of the failed attack and paints a suspenseful, emotional portrait of the resistance fighter that takes us from his early years in the Swabian Alps– when National Socialism arrived in his hometown – to his last days at the Dachau concentration camp.
It has been a decade since director Oliver Hirschbiegel gave us DOWNFALL, arguably the definitive cinematic narrative of Hitler’s last days and 13 MINUTES – his first German production since 2005– marks not only a return to form but a return to a period he has an obvious fascination for.
The script of 13 MINUTES is by Fred Breinersdorfer– who wrote the script for the Oscar® nominated SOPHIE SCHOLL, another German who actively resisted Nazism in her homeland, and his daughter, Léonie-Claire Breinersdorfer. The screenplay keenly shows how the Nazi system slowly seeps into the world of the village and metastasises there, changing the people and creating a collective bankruptcy of moral courage.
Cinematographer Judith Kaufmann delivers a striking and contrasting palette with the interrogation scenes bathed in nearly monochrome greys with consciously static framing to produce an atmosphere of hopelessness. The flashbacks to Elser’s multi-faceted past life are shot mostly with a mobile hand camera. For the sequence depicting the time immediately before the rise of the Reich, the choice is for garish colours, like an old postcard, capturing an idyllic and halcyon quality. Benedikt Herforth and Thomas Stammer’s production design is peerless, featuring the realistic rendering of Depression damaged German villages, depicting buildings and roads in desperate need of repair.
As we traverse the years of Hitler’s rise they gauge the changes in the village’s look, not alone through flags, but also through posters and Nazi kitsch in the dairy shop; or the harvest festival, which is turned into a party event; the misappropriation of old traditions like the Shepherds’ Run and how people simply take these creepy changes for granted.
13 MINUTES is both a riveting historic thriller and a reflection of moral concerns that affect us now.