‘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 films with 13 Days 13 Nights, a tense thriller based on the true story of France’s successful attempt to get its own nationals, plus hundreds of Afghan citizens, out of Kabul in August 2021. The script may be a litany of cliches but there’s grit here too, and the vein of documentary truth that pulses behind some rather brazen nationalistic French virtue-signalling keeps us watching.

The sense of jeopardy is genuinely effective

This feature premieres Out Of Competition in Cannes just days after the six-part miniseries Kabul, dealing with the same story from an Afghan woman’s perspective, finished airing on France 2. Back in January, streaming platform Canal+ Docs released a documentary, Kaboul Chaos, based on a book by David Martinon, the French ambassador at the time (who appears as a minor character in 13 Days 13 Nights). French audiences untroubled by the aura of self-congratulation that clings to the exercise will enjoy 13 Days 13 Nights as an action thriller, not a true account of events, and under those rules it works pretty well, although it comes nowhere of approaching the fireworks of Alex Garland’s co-directed Warfare of this year, a military-only extraction drama set in Iraq.

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Roschdy Zem in the role of Mohamed ‘Mo’ Bida, the French elite police officer whose true story this is. Zem’s air of weathered, world-weary moral probity gives texture to a good cop we’ve all seen before – one too emotional and impulsive to follow the protocol demanded by his position as the embassy’s head of police. The story opens on 15 August 2021, the day the Taliban rolled into Kabul. Mo goes into action mode immediately, jumping into a jeep to extract a wounded Afghan intelligence offer who has been loyal to the French. By the time they get back to the embassy, the Taliban are already setting up roadblocks, and a crowd has assembled outside.

The vast majority of those who took refuge inside the embassy were either French nationals or Afghans who had worked in various capacities for the French army. The screenplay, by Bourboulon and Alexandre Smia, finesses this to emphasise Mo’s heroism as he orders reluctant embassy security chief Martin (Christophe Montenez) to open the gates to allow entry to the huddled masses without background checks. Many of those taken in here would have been French-Afghan interpreters, but somehow, when tasked with negotiating with the Taliban outside the gate, Mo only manages to find one competent French and Afghan speaker: cute NGO worker Eva (Lyna Khoudri).

The best way to approach 13 Days 13 Nights is to know next to nothing about the story, swallow the clichés, and enjoy it as a quite old-fashioned Franco-Hollywood production of the kind Luc Besson used to specialise in. It helps in this respect that the full orchestral soundtrack by Guillaume Roussel is so relentless.

The sense of jeopardy can be effective, especially during a tense stand-off between the evacuation convoy and a rogue Taliban unit in a sodium-lit road underpass en route to the airport. And although smuggling an English-speaking journalist in with the embassy refugees is an obvious gambit to get some of their stories heard and address the conflict between French national interest and global public interest, Sidse Babett Knudsen brings a commitment to the role that makes the ruse almost forgiveable.