Review 406: Prisoners

Prisoners is far from a comfortable viewing but it's a gripping, at times pulse-pounding, edge of your seat and ultimately fulfilling ride.

In rural Pennsylvania, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), his wife Grace (Maria Bello) and their teenage son, Ralph (Dylan Minnette) and young daughter Anna attend a thanksgiving dinner at the home of their friends Franklin Birch (Terence Howard) and his wife Nancy (Viola Davis), their teenage daughter Eliza and little daughter Joy. After the dinner, Anna and Joy go missing.

The plot is simple, but extremely effective as well as emotionally draining. What makes it so emotionally draining is that it taps into that horrifying element of someone, specifically a parent, loosing a child. What this film shows is that people go missing all the time but it's not always children, this can happen to anyone.
Writer Aaron Guzikowski and Director Denis Villeneuve use the films simple premise to great effect to explore the moral boundaries of how far a person needs to be pushed in order to break their morals.

The way the story unfolds is astonishing, the pacing is deliberate, everything operates at a slow build

Denis Villeneuve has described this film as being almost like a Western - a story about the cowboy and the Sheriff. Keller and the Det. Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) are two people with a shared end-goal: Finding the missing girls, but their approaches couldn't be any different.
Keller is a very single minded person, he does things one way and doesn't push himself further than that.
Keller firmly believes that the best way to find his daughter is to resort to extreme measures but Loki knows that is dead end.
Keller is only willing to look in one direction but Loki is someone who will look anywhere to try and find a solution to the problem at hand.

Director Denis Villeneuve direction is, the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson is beautifully haunting, the cinematography is rich and captures the gloomy, downbeat feel of the film as well as the omininity of the Pennsylvania, the production design is , the costume design is fantastic,
and the ending was appropriately haunting and leaves a huge impact on us as an audience as well leave the cinema.

The acting is stupendous, Hugh Jackman proves once again what a fantastic actor he is in the role of Keller Dover, a desperate and very religious father who will go to any lengths to find his daughters and who is pushed to his limits as he begins to take matters into his own hands when the situation starts to seems hopeless.

As the film goes on we see his defining  start to crumble as his life begins to fall into unholy chaos.
Whilst the other parents in this film choose to passively handle the situation, Keller, driven mainly by the love of his family cannot just sit down and do nothing. So he takes the law into his own hands as he truly feels that he can solve the problem more efficiently than the police who have to overcome obstacles.
When he takes action, however brutal or unforgiving it may seem he takes it.

Another actress who I thought was exceptionally good was Maria Bello as Keller's wife Grace, in advent of her daughter going missing, she turns to drugs in her disrepair, she almost immediately breaks down, I felt her pain of worrying about her daughter, the sense of having lost her and not finding any closure to that. Bello portrays that with the utmost earnestness.

Paul Dano is mesmerising as Alex Jones, his portrayal of a man with an IQ of a 10 year old is so authentic it's painful to watch. He's a guy in an extremely bad condition. His extremely traumatic stunted his development and has caused to become the man he is now.

However Jake Gyllenhaal steals the show as Detective Loki, he is a determined, driven police detective his body language is mesmerising and his obsessive drive to find these missing girls is just transfixing and mesmerising to watch unfold.

What's fascinatingly intriguing about Det. Loki as a character is how mysterious a character he is and how we don't really get to know to much about him. He's a man with a mysterious past that's intentionally and beautifully left to interpretation.

Unlike Keller, because Loki is something of an enigma, it's tough to tell where he draws the line and where he doesn't. One on hand, he shows that he's willing to violate  on the other hand, he doesn't resort to torturing suspects for information.

He's a character who has to do his job and is willing to bend the rules to get that job done.
He's a man who's governed by his own rules of life

 

4.5/5.

 

The Anonymoys Critic.