13 Minutes review: Hitler assassination tale fails to ignite

After the accidental camp classic that was Diana and the unhappy disinterment that became The Invasion, Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of Downfall, can be forgiven for returning to the material that generated his greatest triumph. Whereas the earlier film dealt with Hitler's demented collapse, 13 Minutes focuses on events in and around the Führer's rise to supreme power. The film reveals unexplored truths about the internal resistance to the Nazis. It summons up the period effectively. But both character and motivation feel just a little underpowered.

Fred Breinersdorfer, whose script for the excellent Sophie Scholl investigated the Christian resistance, focuses here on the story of brave loner Georg Elser. A leftwards-leaning radical who doesn't seem to have joined the Communist Party, Elser attempted to assassinate the Nazi leadership at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich some months after war was declared. His bomb went off, but Hitler had not yet reached the podium and (obviously) survived.

Hirschbiegel opens with that failure, leads on to Elser’s arrest and then sets out to tell his story through nested flashbacks. The young man, a carpenter, is summoned home to a rural town to help out with the family farm. He falls in with a married woman and becomes disillusioned with his own family. In the film’s supposed present, Elser’s torturers refuse to believe that he acted alone.

Christian Friedel, so good as the teacher in Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, brings both vulnerability and determination to Elser. Judith Kaufmann's cinematography finds contrasts between the metallic brutality of the holding cell and the damp, suffocating town as it sags beneath the weight of oppression.

We are, however, left asking the wrong sort of questions about a film that has an apparent mission to illuminate. Were Elser’s motives personal or political? What drove him towards socialism? In what way is the sketchy romance supposed to illuminate his later courageous actions? How did he survive so long after arrest?

The end result is brisk, brutal and grimly entertaining. But it doesn’t feel quite finished.