Prisoners (2013) Review

Two families share a Thanksgiving meal in a Pennsylvania town. The younger daughters go outside and do not 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.

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 genuinely good and it is not the subject. The subject is 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 is nothing in it I would remove. The length is what 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 does not 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 simultaneously 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 is competent and to a private atrocity that may be pointless, and is asked to hold both for two and a half hours.

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. Paul Dano plays him as frightened, limited and possibly concealing something, and the performance never resolves in either direction. The audience is placed exactly where Dover is, by design.

What the film understands is that certainty is what makes torture tolerable in fiction. Almost every thriller that features it establishes guilt first, which converts the scene into an unpleasant necessity and lets the audience off.

This one refuses. Dover does not know, the audience does not 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, which means the man has taken somebody to a place he has a key to and a history with, and the practicality of that is worse than a purpose-built room would be.

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 cannot build for.

Jackman plays him at maximum volume for most of the film and it is 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, which is either a performance choice or a character detail and the film never says.

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 is 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.

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 is 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 is unbearable.

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 is the correct ending and it is a genuinely hard one to execute. The audience is given an answer and denied the scene that would deliver it, which 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 register intact.

Villeneuve has done the same thing since, repeatedly, and it is 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, which is that Dover has done what he did and none of it helped, and whether anybody finds him does not 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 does not present their refusal as weakness or as virtue, only as a different response to the identical thing.

Should you watch Prisoners?

Yes, and clear the evening. Two and a half hours of November rain, a competent investigation running alongside a private atrocity, a question the film refuses to answer until it cannot matter, and a last shot that gives you the information and denies you the scene.

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