Director: Denis Villeneuve
Talent: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Terrence Howard
Release Date: 27th September 2013
Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners plays out like an airport paperback written under a macabre pen-name: it’s grisly, miserable and has a mass-marketable, paranoiac fascination with the banality 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 missing on Thanksgiving Day. The flash Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) heads up the investigation, but Keller, furious with its apparent lack of progress, 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 confront its audience directly with the consequences of its macho violence, resulting in a disturbing and largely 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 generic redemption or purification: Prisoners ends, perhaps appropriately, in a mess of trauma and destruction.
