In a sentenceJudi Dench runs a finishing school for the Third Reich on the English seafront and the film still finds a way to be dull
Britain, 1939. On the Sussex coast at Bexhill-on-Sea stands a boarding school where the daughters of senior Nazis are sent to learn English, run by the headmistress Miss Rocholl (Judi Dench) alongside the teacher Ilse Keller (Carla Juri). Thomas Miller (Suzy Eddie Izzard) arrives to teach English after his predecessor has disappeared, and it soon emerges that he has other business there. Among the pupils are Astrid (Maria-Victoria Dragus), Gretel (Tijan Marei) and Beatrix (Franziska Brandmeier). Watching from outside the gates are Captain Drey (James D’Arcy), Corporal Willis (Celyn Jones) and Colonel Smith (David Schofield), while Charlie (Jim Broadbent), a local man, is on hand with a lift. As war approaches, Miller has to work out what the school is preparing its girls for, and who inside it is on which side.
A real school for the daughters of the Nazi elite on the Sussex coast is a remarkable premise, and Andy Goddard’s film spends it on a chase we have seen before. Dench and Marc Streitenfeld’s score are worth something; the thriller around them is not.
In the last summer before the war there was a boarding school at Bexhill-on-Sea where the daughters of senior Nazis were sent to learn English. That is true, and it is a better starting point than most thrillers get. Six Minutes to Midnight takes it and makes a man-on-the-run picture out of it, with Andy Goddard directing a script he wrote with Suzy Eddie Izzard and Celyn Jones. The school is where the interest is. The chase is where the film spends its time, and we came out knowing more about the running than the school.
Thomas Miller (Izzard) turns up to teach English after his predecessor has vanished, and it takes the film no time at all to let us know he is there for other reasons. Miss Rocholl (Judi Dench) runs the place with firm courtesy and believes in her girls. Ilse Keller (Carla Juri) teaches them and watches the new man. Captain Drey (James D’Arcy) and Corporal Willis (Celyn Jones) are the British uniforms, Colonel Smith (David Schofield) the voice from London, and Charlie (Jim Broadbent) the local man who happens to be there when a lift is needed. Nearly everybody is who they first appear to be, which in a film whose tagline promises that no one can be trusted is a problem.
Dench is the reason to stay. She plays Rocholl as a woman who loves her pupils and has decided not to ask what they are being educated for, and she lets us watch the deciding. There is a classroom scene early on in which the girls stand and raise their right arms together, neat and practised, and then sit and open their books. We were chilled by it, more than by anything in the thriller that follows, because the salute is treated as a piece of school routine, like grace before dinner. For a few minutes the film understands exactly what it has.
Then it goes back to the plot. Goddard, Izzard and Jones have written an innocent-man story: a suspicion, a run across country, Drey and Willis behind. It is the shape Hitchcock gave The 39 Steps in 1935, and this film invites the comparison by setting itself in the same decade and the same country, and cannot survive it. The turns arrive on schedule and nobody on screen seems surprised by them. Mike Jones cuts the pursuit cleanly enough, but there is no urgency to find, because the script has given nobody a reason to hurry beyond the fact that the war is coming, and we already know that.
Izzard is a difficulty. She plays Miller stiffly, with a fixed, worried face and a voice that barely alters whether she is taking a lesson or being threatened, and the film needs us to want him to get away. We did not, particularly. Juri does more with less: Keller’s loyalties are the one question the film keeps open for a while, and she plays them with a stillness that makes you look at her. The girls, Astrid (Maria-Victoria Dragus), Gretel (Tijan Marei), Beatrix, Sigrid and Paula, are five names on a register. The film is about them and barely bothers to tell them apart, which is the single biggest waste in it.
The craft is tidy. Chris Seager shoots the coast in a pale wash, grey sea and white sky, and the seafront looks like 1939 without straining for it. Marc Streitenfeld’s score keeps a low pulse under scenes the writing has left flat, and does more to suggest danger than the dialogue manages. At 99 minutes it is not long, and it still finds room to feel slow in the middle, which tells you the problem is not length.
Most critics have landed around where we have, and for the same reasons: the history is fascinating and the film does not trust it. We would have watched a quiet two hours about Rocholl, Keller and five German girls on an English beach in August. What we got is a 12-certificate thriller that is perfectly watchable on a wet evening and will send you to look up the real school afterwards, which is the most useful thing it does.
Most critics are unimpressed. The consensus is that Six Minutes to Midnight has an intriguing historical premise and spends it on a conventional spy thriller, with several reviewers saying the real history of the school is more fascinating than anything the film does with it. Where there is praise it goes to Judi Dench, whose performance is picked out for giving her character an emotional coherence the rest of the cast lacks, and in passing to the Welsh scenery and Marc Streitenfeld’s score.
The reservations cluster on the plotting, which the reviews call clichéd, creaky and meandering, with stock characters and perfunctory dialogue. Eddie Izzard divides them: Time Out finds the performance stiff and The Guardian calls the casting a mistake, while Eye for Film, the one clearly positive review, praises Izzard for carrying the character’s many sides. The spread is wide, from Vulture, which finds the film underwritten and television-like, to HeyUGuys, which thinks the second half rescues a slow first.
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Read the full review →Johnston finds the historical premise intriguing but says the film settles into conventional spy-movie plotting. He praises the fascinating historical material, while faulting the film for lacking Hitchcockian verve.
Read the full review →The review finds the spy thriller disappointing and short of Hitchcockian. It singles out Eddie Izzard’s stiff performance as a weakness.
Read the full review →Goldstein finds the thriller largely ho-hum and its plot creaky rather than engaging. He criticizes the perfunctory action and dialogue, and says the underdeveloped characters make their motives hard to care about.
Read the full review →Bradshaw finds the wartime spy drama strained, muddled and uncertain about its sympathies. He criticizes Izzard’s miscasting and says the film’s unusual premise slows the story down.
Read the full review →Rooney finds the film watchable but stodgy, with clichéd plotting that undermines its espionage suspense. He praises the Welsh scenery but says attractive production values cannot compensate for shaky storytelling.
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The 39 StepsHitchcock’s innocent man on the run, done in 86 minutes with wit this film lacks.
Went the Day Well? · not reviewed yetGermans in an English village, made while it could still have happened; properly frightening.
Ministry of Fear · not reviewed yetFritz Lang’s wartime London of fetes, seances and spies, from the Graham Greene novel.
The Remains of the DayEnglish good manners in the appeasement years, and what they chose not to see.
Lore · not reviewed yetThe daughters of the Reich after the fall, walking across Germany; the film this one gestures at.
