Prisoners

The second movie on the programme for our wild ride through the night was Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 thriller Prisoners. It tackles the heavy subject of child kindnapping and the psychology of different people handling this situation.

Our main roles are portrayed by Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Jackman plays the father of one of the kidnapped children and he gives the best performance i’ve ever seen out of him. He gives his character many emotional layers. We see anger, grief, fear and helplesness all masterfully depicted. Gyllenhaal also gives us a very good performance as detective Loki who’s investigating the case, but his acting can be easily overshadowed by Jackman’s, because he’s playing a calm and highly inteligent person, who’s demeanor he hits spot on, but that consist out of little ticks and twiches, which are very hard to perform, but can be easily forgotten while next to Jackman’s show of raw emotion.

I was quite surprised to find out, this was a Denis Villeneuve movie. I previosly saw two of his other movies – Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival. I absolutely loved the former and wasn’t blown away, but quite enjoyed the latter and I could see the similar cinematic choices – the beatiful wide landscape shots and the very dim, but varied color palette, that gave those movies a sense of wonder and a fanastical feel. Prisoners doesn’t have any of that. It is shot brutally realistically, the colors are bleak and depressing and we don’t get any beatiful landscapes, just the characters and their mysery.

That’s really my biggest problem with the movie. I like that sense of wonder. It detaches us from the story a bit, but I’d argue that is a good thing in this case. With Prisoner‚s unapologetic realism I feel way too deep in the story for my liking. The atmoshere is so dreary, the coping mechanisms of the characters so ugly and their psychology so deformed by the drama, that I felt the need to take a bath after seeing it. It’s certainly a very strong experience, just not a entirely pleasant one. I found myself grounded by the impact, but I don’t feel the desire to go back and experience it again.

In this mystery, there’s pretty much no way of figuring out the true culprit ahead of time. The movie very effectively leads you down a path of misleading clues and red herrings untill the very last moments. Once the culprit is revealed though, i didn’t really understand the reasoning behind his crimes and neither behind the acts of one of the wrongly accused, making the final reveal a bit of a miss for me, but the movie is really more about the psychological impact of trauma than the ending.

This movie is not something for the weak of heart. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare come true and it contains some extremely ugly and violent scenes, that really make you wonder about human nature and what we’re capable of in desperate situations. If you want a strong moving story, go for it, but if you’re just looking for a movie to pleasantly pass your time I’d recommend you stay away.