Sunday Review: Prisoners

You decide

By Morris Dean

Last night was HBO's premier of the 2013 film, Prisoners, directed by Denis Villeneuve, with Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo, and Paul Dano). It's a thriller, and was nominated for an award as such. It was also nominated or won for cinemaphotography, acting, and makeup. It's a dependably entertaining film, and my wife and I stayed up two hours later than usual to watch it on cable.
    A short plot outline from IMDb:

When Keller Dover [Hugh Jackman]'s daughter and her friend go missing, he takes matters into his own hands as the police [Jake Gyllenhaal] pursue[s] multiple leads and the pressure mounts. But just how far will this desperate father go to protect his family?

    Pretty far, it turns out. He has already been established to be somewhat of an obsessive personality. The film has opened with his coaching his son in the killing of game, and there's a huge store of "survivalist" foodstuffs and other supplies in his basement. And he's religious, often invoking "God." There's enough for you to wonder whether the film is more a psycho-religious thriller than simply a police procedural. For after the detective aggressively but fairly grills the mentally deficient young man (Paul Dano) who was driving the RV near which the girls were seen playing when they were looking for a lost red whistle and releases him because of lack of evidence, the father is on hand at the jail to attack the suspect and hear him say something he believes to be incriminating, even though no one else hears it. That is, did the suspect really say it, or did the father in his obsessive certainty only imagine it?
    He's so certain that he heard it and that the suspect knows something that, while the detective is following police procedure and interviewing known sex offenders in the area (in Pennsylvania), he stakes out and kidnaps the young man that evening, while he's walking his dog....

Or is it a horror show? The father enlists his hesitant friend (Terrence Howard) whose daughter was also taken to help with the interrogation, even though the friend know that's "it's just not right." Images follow of the suspect's brutally beaten face (likely the focus of the film's nomination for makeup), and Jackman's ferocious rage as he brings a hammer down was hard for me to watch, and I thought, when he started up his power saw, that a bathtub scene from Brian De Palma's Scarface was in the offing. Fortunately for me, and the young man, the father was only going to fashion some planks for the next stage of the ordeal by water....
    And there's the horror involved in the detective's ongoing investigation into a second suspect, in whose kitchen sink he finds the head of a pig and whose living room floor is covered with lockers, a few of which the detective breaks open to find bloodied children's clothing and writhing snakes....
    And, finally, there's the film's problematic ending, at night in the yard of the first suspect's guardian, after the detective has said good night to the crew who are excavating for bodies and is standing in contemplation of his growing sense of having failed, listening to the sounds of the night, one sound in particular....
_______________
Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

Comment box is located below