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Prisoners
| Released |
27 September 2013 |
| Director |
Denis Villeneuve |
Starring
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Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Viola Davis, Paul Dano, Melissa Leo |
| Writer(s) |
Aaron Guzikowski |
Producer(s)
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Kira Davis, Broderick Johnson, Adam Kolbrenner, Andrew A. Kosove |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
146 minutes |
| Genre |
Crime, drama, thriller |
| Rating |
15A |
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Inescapably entertaining.
Prisoners is a film that’s trying very hard. It has a cast full of Oscar bait (Hugh Jackman, Terrance Howard, Melissa Leo, Paul Dano), deftly constructed cinematography, and a high stakes, morally hair-raising plot, the abduction of a child. In the wrong hands it could be an exercise in begging for critical acclaim, but it isn’t.
Prisoners is an incredibly tense thriller that manages to both entertain and ask difficult questions of its audience.
When working class father Keller Dover’s (Jackman) daughter disappears, it launches a tense race against time to track down her abductor. When investigating officer Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) appears to be dragging his feet, Dover takes the law into his own hands. The film is very much centred around its two leads, Jackman and Gyllenhaal, and as the search for the missing girls becomes more desperate, both men are pushed to their limits.
Despite the film’s confusion about which man is the protagonist, this duality actually works very well. Part of this is to do with director Denis Villeneuve’s (Incendies) gift for characterisation. In a film with such a broad cast of family members, police officers, suspects and false leads all juggling for screen time, Villeneuve defines his characters with little details. Sometimes all we get is an expression or an item of clothing or a barely noticeable mannerism, but it’s enough. There are few grand gestures and lots of subtle suggestions, hints, clues and red herrings. The film is absolutely dense with twists and turns, but they are executed with enough skill that they stack tension on top of tension until the film becomes almost unbearable yet impossible to turn away from.
Prisoners seems unclear as to whether it wants to be a straight detective story or a character study of the real people behind a detective story, but this doesn’t even matter since it succeeds at both.
While the film’s lengthy run time does evoke a long-drawn out chase, it also gives the audience enough space to figure out exactly whodunit long before the big reveal. But even this fault doesn’t really matter, since the audience’s connection with the well-drawn characters plasters over any plot holes.
Prisoners is an ambitious film. There is a lot of plot. There are more twists than a bag of corkscrews. There are a novel’s worth of characters. There is the heavy-handed moral question of “what would you do if it was your child missing?” But everything works. The majority of the cast deliver career best levels of scenery chewing. The tightness of the narrative keeps the tension ticking over and the morality stuff firmly bedded down in the subtext. It is simply a captivating piece of cinema.
- Bernard O’Rourke |
