TRUTH & TREASON - Mark Reviews Movies

Truth & Treason, Angel

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | October 16, 2025

Only a teenager would be bold enough to think that he could stand up to and single-handedly take down a totalitarian regime, bent on taking away the rights and lives of others. This is not a criticism of such a belief. Indeed, it might be a little envious of that youthful conviction that all it takes to change something unjust is for a single person to vigorously declare that thing to be unjust. If everyone kept even a little bit of that confidence of youth, such declarations would be too widespread and loud to ignore.

Co-writer/director Matt Whitaker's Truth & Treason arrives, of course, at a time when people would do well to take its lesson to heart. This is based on a true story (one that Whitaker detailed in a shorter documentary more than two decades ago) about three teenagers in Nazi Germany. They have seen enough of the bullying of their fellow kids parading around in brown shirts, of an elder of their church saluting a dictator during religious gatherings, and of knowing that one of their friends is suffering in a camp, simply because his identification papers have marked him as an "unwanted" ethnicity. One of the teens is young enough to genuinely believe he can do something about it.

He's Helmuth Hübener (Ewan Horrocks), who is 16 when this story starts and will be only 17 when it ends. Helmuth is intelligent and well-read, a thing that everyone who meets him, listens to him talk, or reads something he has written can tell almost immediately. No one suspects, however, that a kid could understand politics enough to write of the obvious failings of Nazism and its leader, while sneaking in quotes from books that have been banned across Germany and its occupied territories. He is essentially invisible, and as presented here, Helmuth might have gone on to do many, many important things, if not for that—in this case, tragic—teenaged belief of being invincible.

Whitaker and Ethan Vincent's screenplay does present this story as a tragedy, because it is undoubtedly one, but it does so in a way that is also compelling as a low-key revolutionary procedural. Helmuth doesn't have much with which to work while trying to convince his fellow citizens that Nazism is doomed, that Adolf Hitler will destroy the country and people he falsely purports to love, and that everything coming out of this regime is a lie.

He owns a typewriter, was gifted a wireless radio from his older brother so that he can listen to forbidden broadcasts, and collects leaflet-sized red paper from the archive of banned books in the city hall of Hamburg. That and the truth are all he needs to be perceived as a legitimate threat to a state that survives on lies, intimidation, threats, and violence.

Helmuth and his friends shouldn't have to worry about this, and indeed, there's a brief sequence of innocent young playfulness at the very start. The boy and his three best pals—Karl-Heinz Schnibbe (Ferdinand McKay), Rudi Wobbe (Daf Thomas), and Salomon Schwarz (Nye Occomore)—ride their bikes through an idyllic forest, dare each to jump into a river from a bridge, and jokingly barb each other for hesitating to take the leap.

Shortly after, Whitaker sends them and the film into reality, where the Hitler Youth try to intimidate the four, Salomon is viciously beaten by soldiers for being out past curfew and having some Jewish ancestry, and the bishop (played by Daniel Betts) of their Mormon congregation either believes in or doesn't want to upset the Nazis. At a certain point, those two possibilities are essentially interchangeable, and the point here is when the church elder posts a sign barring Jews from entering the chapel.

Soon enough, soldiers take away Salomon and his family. A distraught and angry Helmuth starts writing flyers against Hitler, fascism, and the country's military aggression, stuffing them into mailboxes and posting them on bulletin boards around the city, especially while everyone else is hiding during air raids. He eventually tells Karl-Heinz and Rudi, who want to help, and local SS officer Erwin Mussener (Rupert Evans) begins searching for the people spreading what is high treason under the laws of Nazi Germany.

Superficially, this is a thriller, because we follow both Helmuth, as he increases his anti-Nazi operation, and Erwin, as he uses whatever clues he has—the typewriter's text "fingerprints," the card stock, the language within the flyers—to hunt his foe. Erwin becomes a fascinating figure here, not because he is presented as sympathetic or anything like that, but because he is disposed to and, later, wants to believe the lies of the regime. The truth is difficult for him, especially when it would mean that he and his allegiances are directly to blame for his actions and their consequences.

On a deeper level, though, Truth & Treason does approach and, as Helmuth's enviable and morally righteous folly starts to collapse around him, confront its ideas in a more direct way. As presented here, the story of Hübener and his friends is not some empty rallying cry against totalitarianism and the evil performed by those who adhere to it. Doing the right thing may seem easy in theory, but in practice, it is trying and lonely and requires much, much more than just youthful boldness. That's the lesson for Helmuth and his friends, who rise to the occasion in ways that many of us would want to believe of ourselves—but fewer of us actually could.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products