Director: Denis Villeneuve
Talent: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Terrence Howard
Release Date: 1st November 2013
Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners plays out like an airport paperback written under a chilling pen-name: it’s macabre, sad and has a mass-marketable, paranoiac attraction with the predictability of evil. Here, a Pennsylvania suburb’s history of child abductions continues when two young girls ― daughters of Keller (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin (Terrence Howard) ― go absent on Thanksgiving Day. The flash Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) heads up the investigation, but Keller, enraged with its evident lack of development, takes the law into his own hands, abducting and torturing a developmentally disabled man (Paul Dano) he believes knows something about the crime. Unlike an airport paperback, Prisoners attempts to face up to its audience directly with the consequences of its macho violence, resulting in an upsetting and mainly one-note morality play. At times it resembles a horror film, both in scoring and in visual terms ― unusual for a Roger Deakins cinematography job ― but its conclusion is not one of standard redemption or distillation: Prisoners ends, perhaps appropriately, in a mess of trauma and destruction.
Words by Oisín Murphy-Hall
