‘13 Days 13 Nights’ review: Roschdy Zem stars in real-life Kabul extraction thriller

Dir: Martin Bourboulon. 2025. France. 111mins.

French director Martin Bourboulon follows up his pair of 2023 Three Musketeers movies with 13 Days 13 Nights, a tense thriller primarily based on the true story of France’s profitable try and get its personal nationals, plus a whole lot of Afghan residents, out of Kabul in August 2021. The script could also be a litany of cliches however there’s grit right here too, and the vein of documentary fact that pulses behind some fairly brazen nationalistic French virtue-signalling retains us watching.

The sense of jeopardy is genuinely efficient

This function premieres Out Of Competitors in Cannes simply days after the six-part miniseries Kabul, coping with the identical story from an Afghan girl’s perspective, completed airing on France 2. Again in January, streaming platform Canal+ Docs launched a documentary, Kaboul Chaos, primarily based on a e-book by David Martinon, the French ambassador on the time (who seems as a minor character in 13 Days 13 Nights). French audiences untroubled by the aura of self-congratulation that adheres to the train will get pleasure from 13 Days 13 Nights as an motion thriller, not a real account of occasions, and below these guidelines it really works fairly properly, though it comes nowhere of approaching the fireworks of Alex Garland’s co-directed Warfare of this 12 months, a military-only extraction drama set in Iraq.

It’s laborious to think about anybody apart from Roschdy Zem within the function of Mohamed ‘Mo’ Bida, the French elite police officer whose true story that is. Zem’s air of weathered, world-weary ethical probity provides texture to cop we’ve all seen earlier than – one too emotional and impulsive to comply with the protocol demanded by his place because the embassy’s head of police. The story opens on 15 August 2021, the day the Taliban rolled into Kabul. Mo goes into motion mode instantly, leaping right into a jeep to extract a wounded Afghan intelligence provide who has been loyal to the French. By the point they get again to the embassy, the Taliban are already establishing roadblocks, and a crowd has assembled outdoors.

The overwhelming majority of those that took refuge contained in the embassy have been both French nationals or Afghans who had labored in varied capacities for the French military. The screenplay, by Bourboulon and Alexandre Smia, finesses this to emphasize Mo’s heroism as he orders reluctant embassy safety chief Martin (Christophe Montenez) to open the gates to permit entry to the huddled lots with out background checks. A lot of these taken in right here would have been French-Afghan interpreters, however in some way, when tasked with negotiating with the Taliban outdoors the gate, Mo solely manages to search out one competent French and Afghan speaker: cute NGO employee Eva (Lyna Khoudri).

One of the simplest ways to method 13 Days 13 Nights is to know subsequent to nothing in regards to the story, swallow the clichés, and revel in it as a fairly old school Franco-Hollywood manufacturing of the sort Luc Besson used to specialize in. It helps on this respect that the total orchestral soundtrack by Guillaume Roussel is so relentless.

The sense of jeopardy could be efficient, particularly throughout a tense stand-off between the evacuation convoy and a rogue Taliban unit in a sodium-lit highway underpass en path to the airport. And though smuggling an English-speaking journalist in with the embassy refugees is an apparent gambit to get a few of their tales heard and tackle the battle between French nationwide curiosity and international public curiosity, Sidse Babett Knudsen brings a dedication to the function that makes the ruse virtually forgiveable.