Number 55 (2014)
★★ — Number 55 (2014)
Number 55 (2014) arrives as one of the more prominent Croatian productions to come out of the last decade, telling a story rooted in one of the most turbulent episodes in recent European history. The Croatian War of Independence, which ran from 1991 to 1995, saw the newly declared Republic of Croatia fight to break free from the collapsing Yugoslav federation, with some of the heaviest early fighting concentrated in the autumn of 1991. It is precisely that period the film reconstructs, following a small unit of Croatian soldiers who find themselves pinned down in a house for the better part of twenty-four hours after their improvised armoured vehicle is destroyed in an ambush. The film is based on actual events, which gives the whole thing a weight that purely fictional war films sometimes struggle to manufacture. For international audiences, the Croatian War of Independence remains a conflict that rarely gets the big-screen treatment it arguably deserves, so even the existence of a film like this carries a certain significance, whatever its artistic merits turn out to be.
The film was produced by Telefilm and directed by Kristijan Milić, working within the conventions of the Croatian national cinema tradition. At ninety minutes, it keeps things lean, and the siege structure, a small group of men holding out against overwhelming force, places it squarely in the lineage of war films that rely on claustrophobia and attrition rather than sweeping battlefield spectacle. That is a format which can work on a modest budget, provided the tension is managed well. (It is also, for what it is worth, the kind of premise that suits Croatian landscapes and production resources far better than anything trying to recreate large-scale set-piece warfare.) The principal cast is made up of Croatian actors, including Goran Bogdan, Marko Cindrić, Alan Katić, Dražen Mikulić and Marinko Prga, none of whom will be household names outside the region but who collectively carry the film's ensemble dynamic. War films live or die by whether you believe in the men on screen as a unit, and that chemistry is something no amount of technical craft can substitute for. For a sense of how a very different war film handles the single-continuous-action format, it is worth having a look at what I made of 1917, which pushes that approach about as far as it can go.
In terms of genre company, Number 55 fits into a broader wave of action-oriented war pictures from the 2010s that placed a premium on immediacy and physical grit over polish, films that leaned hard into handheld camerawork and sound design to sell their intensity. Whether that approach succeeds here is very much the question, and it is one worth considering alongside the film's status as a piece of national memory-making, a Croatian story told for Croatian audiences first and foremost. The film also stands as one of the relatively rare examples of Croatian genre cinema to receive wider distribution, which puts it in interesting company alongside other Croatian productions, such as the animated short Manivald, though that film operates in an entirely different register. For another war film where the gap between ambition and execution is very much up for debate, my review of Lessons of Darkness is worth a read alongside this one.
A-Z World Movie Tour Croatia Based on a true story. Started off really strongly. A no nonsense raw look at modern warfare during the Croatian war of independence from Yugoslavia in the mid 90s. The story starts off really strong and has some really strong special effects for the injuries. Very quickly though it loses steam and just kind of meanders to the finish. Something really jarring is the use of shakycam and the constant soundtrack of random gunfire to try to create an aura of tension in what is otherwise a pretty mundane movie. A bit disappointed in the end.
That sense of disappointment is one I find hard to shake, if I am honest. When a film opens with genuine rawness and then gradually lets the air out of its own tyres, it is almost more frustrating than a picture that was never really trying. The injury effects and the early momentum suggested a film that understood what it had in its hands, which makes the drift into shakycam shorthand and ambient gunfire all the more deflating. Those are the tools of a production that has stopped trusting its own story. For me, the comparison that keeps coming to mind is the difference between tension that is built and tension that is simply announced, and Number 55, for all its good intentions, ends up doing rather too much of the latter. A shame, really, because the history deserved better.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2025-06-07
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Croatia: Manivald (2017)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More war: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · The General (1926) · Men Without Wings (1946) · Fires Were Started (1943)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
