Prisoners (2013) Review
9/10
Two families share a Thanksgiving meal in a Pennsylvania town. The younger daughters go outside and don’t come back. A camper van that was parked on the street is found that evening with a young man inside who has the intelligence of a child. Prisoners grabs me early and never loosens its grip. It’s a hard film to sit through and a harder one to turn off, and it keeps asking what I’d do in Dover’s place without ever handing me a comfortable answer. The 9 is for a film that takes a familiar structure and uses it to ask a question most thrillers avoid. The detective plot is good, and the subject sits underneath it: what a reasonable man does when the system moves slower than his fear.
It runs a hundred and fifty-three minutes, which is long, and there’s nothing in it I’d remove. The length makes the central act land, because the audience has to sit in the same week the characters do. It also made around one hundred and twenty-two million dollars against a budget near forty-six, which for a two and a half hour film about this particular subject is a result that nobody involved in making the thing had predicted.
Two Films Running at Once
Detective Loki works the case properly. He follows evidence, interviews people, obtains warrants, and the film gives him a full investigation with its own logic and its own dead ends.
Keller Dover doesn’t wait. He takes Alex Jones from outside a police station, chains him in an abandoned building his father owned, and begins hurting him.
The structure runs both at the same time and never lets one comment on the other. Loki is doing the correct thing slowly and Dover is doing the terrible thing quickly, and neither knows what the other has found.
That parallel is why the film works. The audience is given complete access to a police procedure that’s competent and to a private atrocity that may be pointless, and is asked to hold both for two and a half hours.
Two plots that never converge until late produce a reader who’s continuously comparing them. Each scene in one is read against the other. The requirement is that both must be legitimate. If you show the official process as incompetent, the vigilante is justified and you’ve written a simpler book.
Loki is good at his job. That single decision makes Dover’s actions a question instead of a necessity. Withhold the connection. The reader holding two incomplete pictures does more work than one following a single thread, and the work is the engagement.
The Question It Will Not Answer
The film’s central uncertainty is whether Alex knows anything, and it maintains that uncertainty far past the point of comfort.
Paul Dano deserves particular credit for that, because the part requires him to be exactly ambiguous for the entire running time. Any single moment of clarity in either direction would release the audience, and he never gives them one.
He says one thing, early, that could mean everything or nothing. Dano plays him as frightened, limited and possibly concealing something, and the performance never tips either way. I think it’s the hardest job in the film and he never slips, and in every bathroom scene he leaves me exactly where Dover is, unsure and sick about it.
What the film understands is that certainty makes torture tolerable in fiction. Almost every thriller that features it establishes guilt first. That converts the scene into an unpleasant necessity and lets the audience off.
This one refuses. Dover doesn’t know, the audience doesn’t know, and every session in that bathroom is being watched without the protection of certainty. The location is doing work as well. The building is a derelict apartment block Dover’s father owned, so the man has taken somebody to a place he holds a key to and shares a history with, and that practicality chills me more than any purpose-built room would.
Jackman and Gyllenhaal
Keller Dover is a carpenter, a survivalist, a devout man, and somebody who has spent his life preparing for a disaster and has now met one he can’t build for.
Jackman plays him at maximum volume for most of the film and it’s the correct choice.
This is a man with no capacity for patience being asked to be patient while his daughter is somewhere. The praying is the detail that makes it work. He recites the Lord’s Prayer before and after, and the film never comments on the contradiction.
Gyllenhaal’s Loki is the opposite and is doing something subtler. A detective with a case clearance record, visible tics, no personal life the film discloses, and an increasing inability to leave the case alone. He blinks constantly. That’s either a performance choice or a character detail and the film never says. Gyllenhaal is the performance I’d come back to this film for. I love watching Loki’s patience fray a little more each day, and I buy every second of a man who can’t put a case down.
The two men have perhaps four scenes together and the film is built so that every one of them is a negotiation between somebody who suspects and somebody who’s hiding something.
Melissa Leo is the third performance worth naming and the least discussed. Holly Jones is on screen throughout, is treated as a peripheral figure by everybody including the audience, and the reason that works is that the film gives her nothing to do until it does.
Give your two leads opposite relationships to time. One can’t wait and the other must, and every scene between them is that disagreement without either stating it. The friction is structural and requires no dialogue about it.
A faith that continues through an atrocity is more interesting than one that breaks. Dover prays before torturing somebody, which the film shows and declines to analyze.
Never explain a tic. Whether Loki’s blinking is trauma, habit or nothing is the audience’s problem, and their uncertainty is worth more than an answer.
Deakins
This is among the best-photographed films of the last twenty years and the approach is almost entirely restraint. Rain, grey light, bare trees, wet roads and interiors lit from windows. Almost no camera movement that’s not motivated, almost no shot that draws attention to itself, and a color palette that removes anything warm from the entire film.
The one exception is the vigil. Candles in a street at night, the only warm light in a hundred and fifty minutes, and the film puts it early so the audience has something to measure the rest against. The single most famous shot is a car driving away from camera down a rain-soaked road, held long, with the girls’ disappearance already established. It does nothing clever and it’s unbearable. That shot of the car on the wet road is the image I carry out of the film. Deakins makes the whole picture feel like a cold hand on the back of my neck, and I’d give the photography a 10 on its own.
What the photography achieves is atmosphere without decoration. A film about a search in November looks like November, and the audience is cold for two and a half hours.
The Last Shot
The film ends on a sound. Loki is standing in a yard, everybody is leaving, and he hears something faint, and the film cuts to black on his reaction. That’s the correct ending and it’s a hard one to execute. The audience is given an answer and denied the scene that would deliver it. That means the resolution happens in their head instead of on screen.
It also solves a problem the film has been carrying. Any depicted rescue would have required a tone the picture has refused for two and a half hours, and a cut to black keeps the tone intact.
Villeneuve has done the same thing since, repeatedly, and it’s becoming a signature. Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 all end at a point slightly before the audience expects, and in each case the withheld scene is the one a lesser film would have built toward.
What it leaves is the thing the film was really about: Dover has done what he did and none of it helped, and whether anybody finds him doesn’t change that. Viola Davis and Terrence Howard carry the other half of that argument. The second family are given the same loss, refuse the same method, and the film doesn’t present their refusal as weakness or as virtue, only as a different response to the identical thing.
An ending can supply the information and withhold the scene. The reader completes it and their version is more specific than yours. The requirement is that the information must be unambiguous. Withholding both the scene and the answer is a different and much riskier choice.
Cut before the emotional payoff if the payoff would break your tone. A rescue sequence here would have been the only warm thing in the film.
Ask what your ending changes. Here the outcome alters nothing about what Dover did, and the film knows that’s the point.
Should you watch Prisoners?
Yes, and clear the evening. It’s a 9 because the parallel investigation, Dano’s unreadable face, Deakins’s November rain and that last shot hold me the whole way. The only thing keeping it off a 10 is how much it takes out of me, which makes it a film I have to be ready for.
