Truth and Treason (2025), reviewed by Conor Hilton
I was deeply moved by Truth and Treason, Matt Whitaker’s 2025 drama about Helmuth Hübener, one of my personal Mormon heroes. No doubt my own affection for Hübener and his story played a part in that emotional response, but I think the film does really solid, good work all around. Hübener was a part of the broad, unaffiliated German resistance, working closely with a few friends to distribute pamphlets containing information from illegal BBC news reports and other anti-fascist materials. He was caught, tried, and executed by the German state; the youngest resistance fighter to be executed. The film tells his story.
It is certainly rare to see an explicitly, unapologetically Mormon character on screen, let alone several, and this movie offers that and more. There is something powerful in this type of representation that I have rarely encountered on the big screen. The Mormonism of the characters is thoroughly integrated into who they are and the story being told, without stopping to explain details to the audience, trusting that the emotions and relationships between characters are strong enough and legible enough to carry the audience through, regardless of their familiarity with the Church.
An early moment in the film where the Bishop (historically, a branch president) offers a Nazi salute in the chapel right before the congregation sings “Do What is Right” is an on-the-nose, but poignant juxtaposition, that also sets up Hübener’s invocation of “do what is right” to his friends from church that he enlists in his antifascist resistance efforts.
The characters across the board are largely well-written and viewed with a lot of compassion by the film, even characters that would be easy to villainize are given a depth of humanity that is compelling. Some have, and will likely continue to, criticized some of this humanizing as misguided, building sympathy for evil. I think however that the film is fairly successful at demonstrating that good people can be deeply complicit in terrible things. Which, for me, is a much starker, more challenging message than one that argues that only the most evil among us can be responsible for great evil.
The film is a solid, sturdy effort anchored in good performances and structure, with dialogue that largely carries the story and characters forward without drawing attention to itself. There are a couple of awkward, somewhat stilted line readings and a few plot beats that felt more forced and trope-y as opposed to fully organic to the story–the romance in particular, but those are minor in the grand scheme of the film and never rise to full distractions (and a somewhat forced, trope-y romance is by no means a unique problem for a film such as this!).
I thought the score was great and unless my ears deceived me made great use of some hymn-like flourishes woven into the melodies, which added color and depth to the Mormonism of the film.
Much can be made of the film’s use of violence–there is a mix of some torture scenes and some bloody street-fighting, and then lots of implied, more severe violence. The violence was a bit much for one of my viewing companions, who is admittedly quite squeamish around violence, which was actually a productively re-sensitising experience for me, drawing my attention again to the actual horrors of violence. There is something particularly interesting, I think, in the ways that the film’s use of violence draws a throughline from the state-sponsored violence and the more interpersonal street-fight violence, that violence begets violence, as it were.
A part of me really wanted to see the excommunication of Hübener depicted because I think that is an important part of the story for me and my fellow co-religionists to wrestle with. However, I can’t really see a way for it to be added to the film without it totally destroying the structure and I did find the conclusion of the bishop’s arc in the film to be appropriately ambiguous emotionally and compelling.
I wept as the credits rolled and The Lower Lights’ “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” played, thinking about the power and cost of truth in a world that increasingly is filled with lies and utter disregard for the truth and love. A powerful, moving, challenging achievement that I am glad exists and I hope many can see.
And may we all do what is right, and let the consequence follow!