Ah, so this is what a grownup movie outta Hollywood feels like! They’re such rare beasts these days that my first instinct when I encounter one is to do a double-take and look for the foreign indie wizard behind the curtain.
And there he is: the acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, whose 2010 film Incendies was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, is making his English-language and studio debut with Prisoners. But fair play to Warner Bros. for granting the flick a budget generous enough to snag some of the most interesting big names working today, and for giving it a release that means mainstream audiences will have easy access to it.
There’s nothing “alternative” about this movie except that it requires nothing fantastical or imaginary to ensure that it is thoroughly gripping and frequently, unexpectedly ugly. It is the depressing mundanity of the horrors on display that makes it so intense, so uncomfortable and so brilliant: It’s unvarnished, dismal reality from the opening moments, when we are welcomed to a Thanksgiving day in Pennsylvania that is all foggy gray haze lingering around bare trees, pouring rain and general outdoor misery – that’s what Thanksgiving typically is in the Northeast, not a fall-foliage wonderland (the leaves are dead and fallen by late November). This ain’t no story about tragedy striking out of the blue and shattering an idyll. It’s a story about tragedy revealing some just barely disguised other tragedies that have been ignored, forgotten or never seen as tragedies at all.
It’s like this. Two families, good friends all around, have gathered together for the holiday: the Dovers, Keller (Hugh Jackman) and Grace (Maria Bello), and the Birches, Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy (Viola Davis), and their kids. After the celebratory dinner, their two little girls go play outside… and disappear without a trace. The police, led by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), home in quickly on a suspect, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), who drives the creepy serial-killer RV that was seen in the neighborhood and who exudes creepy guilt. But the girls are nowhere to be found, Jones protests his innocence, and there’s no physical evidence. Loki has to let him go.
Keller, enraged and grief stricken, takes matters into his own hands, harassing Jones even as Loki continues to search. And this is where it starts to get really interesting.
Prisoners is, of course, primarily a suspense thriller, the kind in which we’re invited to try to solve the case. But it challenges us to reexamine the appearance of guilt, a fascinatingly trying experience. Shocking actions are committed here, some quick, some building slowly in their horror. We witness many of these actions along with other characters on the screen who are as horrified as we are, and who have as complex reactions as we do. We know some characters are guilty, and we make assumptions about others that we are forced to reconsider.
The other superb movie Prisoners reminded me of, even though it’s not really very similar at all, is The Silence of the Lambs. Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski has taken a trope of movies about terrible crimes – the exploration of criminal psychology – and expanded it to look at the aberrant psychology that drives us all. Except it’s not truly “aberrant” if it’s prompted by the ordinary awfulness of the world our formative years. Everyone here is a prisoner of their past. The tragedy for some of them is that their past is an inescapable prison. The tragedy for others is that their prison is not inescapable, yet they stay there anyway.
PRISONERS (4) Directed by Denis Villeneuve • Starring Hugh Jackman, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Viola Davis, Jake Gyllenhaal, • Rated R • 146 min. At Maya Cinemas, Century Cinemas Del Monte, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas, Cannery Row XD