Movie Review: "Prisoners" (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

SICKENING MISERY: "PRISONERS" IS AWFUL TO BEHOLD

by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

 Above: Paul Dano is interrogated by Jake Gyllenhaal in Mr. Villeneuve's horrifying film

 

When it comes to violence in movies, how much is too much?  That’s the question on my mind as I write this review of “Prisoners,” the new kidnapping drama from Canadian director Denis Villeneuve.  For I long time now, I have bought tickets to awards season films that test your tolerance for watching the unwatchable.  In the case of a powerfully poetic work like “Drive,” that journey is often as rewarding as it is painful.  But “Prisoners” is another matter.  To be blunt, it is the first film in a long time that I found too disturbing to bear.

            The film starts out harmlessly enough.  We meet two couples—Keller and Grace Dover (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello) and Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis)—who are celebrating Thanksgiving together with their young children.  Several facts things are established in this scene, mainly that the Dovers are affable, a little obnoxious, and thoroughly ordinary (“That’s enough,” Grace tells their daughter Anna when she rings the Birches doorbell multiple times).  But all that is overshadowed when suddenly, the daughters of both families disappear.

            To say the least, this is a horrifying scenario, all the more because Mr. Villeneuve and his editors (Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, who frequently collaborate with Clint Eastwood) don’t gloss over the disappearance with adrenaline-fueled quick cutting.  Instead, they drag the revelation out, with the parents gradually growing more concerned as they don’t find their daughters in front of the TV, don’t find them out in the yard, and finally don’t find them in the neighborhood at all.  But at this early point, the film doesn’t feel too sickening.

            The main reason for this is that a policeman known only as “Detective Loki” (Jake Gyllenhaal) is quick to arrive on the scene and offer hope for the daughters’ safe return.  And while I can’t fathom why writer Aaron Guzikowski insisted that the character bear the name of Marvel Comics’ most famous villain, I’m glad Mr. Gyllenhaal was cast in the role because for a time, his performance makes the film tolerable, even enjoyable.  As “Proof” showed, Mr. Gyllenhaal makes a superbly affable nerd, but here he creates a character that is almost the opposite—a man who’s inarticulate in normal conversations but cold and shrewd on the job (even though his rage against suspects provides a satisfying outlet for our own horror at the proceedings).  When we first meet Loki, he’s making awkwardly banal chit chat with a waitress but as soon as he gets the call about the abduction of the Birch and Dover children, he seals himself up for a long hunt.

            It is during this hunt that “Prisoners” is at its best.  The mess of red herrings that infest the film’s black and gray shadows reel you in, making you wonder if there’s an answer in the mess.  Indeed, if the film had stuck to the thread of Loki’s search while letting us peer into his firmly controlled psyche, it might have worked.  But it’s not to be.  As soon as Loki fails to press charges against suspect Alex Jones (Paul Dano), Keller Dover decides to go after Jones himself.  Soon, not only has Keller stumbled down a horribly brutal path, but he has plunged the entire film into misery as well.

            You may ask—what kind of misery?  In the main, torture.  Before long, Alex is chained up in an abandoned bathroom with his face covered in blood.  But it keeps getting worse.  Loki is almost certain that Alex is innocent but Keller isn’t convinced.  So he keeps on punching until finally, Alex’s face is so red and swollen that you barely see his eyes under his bloated, brutalized skin.

            Beholding this image in a dark theater, I felt for the first time that “Prisoners” might lose me.  I did hope that there might be some redemptive idea or scene to alleviate the horror of seeing a helpless and harmless young man nearly beaten to death, but it never comes.  Mr. Villeneuve does try a last ditch attempt to reengineer the film as an entertaining suspense thriller (mainly by inserting a sleekly rainy car chase and an evil grandma so demonic that she’s almost a cartoon), but perversely these attempts at cinematic artifice mixed with ugly realism make the film even more sickening.  Somehow, even the story's almost-happy ending doesn’t feel like enough to dullthe pain.

            For all that, it is hard to deny the few merits of “Prisoners.”  After all it is an intelligently crafted piece of work, a film that not only offers many answers to its mystery (at one point, Loki believes Keller might be the kidnapper) while carefully suggesting provocative moral ambiguities, particularly in the discomfortingly believable scenes when the Birches condemn but accept Keller’s torture of Alex in the hope of finding their daughter.  And indeed, in the vein of a film like “Requiem for a Dream,” the movie leaves you almost awestruck at its brutality, even if you can’t withstand it.  On some level, it’s hard not to feel overpowered and even a little impressed.

            But if that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, it’s because it’s not.  There are moments in “Prisoners” that are worth watching, like the scene where Loki sits with his hands buried in his greasy hair, convinced he’s failed to find the kids.  But the bottom line is that the level of human to human cruelty on display hear is just too awful to bear.  Watching the film’s depiction of children being tortured and traumatized, I began to hate “Prisoners” just as much as its awful characters.  For at a certain point, they become indistinguishable because the movie is a traumatic experience in itself.

            Despite this, I know there are still those who will defend “Prisoners.”  They might say that the film is superior to run of the mill torture porn because it condemns torture; they might even assert that the film’s target audience—which is likely middle class, college-educated moviegoers with a taste for art cinema—need to have their senses rattled a bit.  But as a college educated middle class moviegoer with a taste for art cinema I say this: I don’t need a morbidly violent film to tell me that horrific things happen.  Living in a world where children get beaten and kidnapped is bad enough without having to watch it happen in a horrible movie as well.