Skip to main content
Close

Prisoners: Pure Genre with Deep Qestions

By Jim Rohner · September 23, 2013

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. That's the mantra by which Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) operates. it's why he has a basement stocked full of food and supplies for emergencies, it's why he teaches his son, Ralph (Dylan Minnette), how to hunt and it's why his wife, Grace (Mario Bello), becomes bedridden and practically vegetative after their young daughter, Anna (Erin Gerasimovich), is abducted on Thanksgiving Day. "You made us feel so safe," she says through tears to her husband. "You swore you'd protect us." Right or wrong, Keller takes on the responsibility for both the disappearance and recovery of his daughter and her friend, Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons), whose parents Nancy (Viola Davis) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) were hosting Thanksgiving dinner when the girls asked for permission to play outside.

Keller, with his rows of neatly stacked D batteries and sealed steel cans, reacts extremely and quickly, a knee-jerk reaction fueled by an otherwise rational man whose love for his daughter is matched only by his panic in the face of a situation for which he is completely unprepared. In his eyes, the prime suspect, a young man named Alex Jones (Paul Dano) with the IQ of a 10-year old, is guilty as sin and the efforts of Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) are insufficient. How can Alex be released after 48 hours when he is so obviously guilty? Sure, there was no physical evidence in his beaten up RV to support the theory that he abducted the girls and a 10-hour interrogation offers nothing either, but who else is there?

"They didn't even cry until I let them go." This confession, heard by Keller and only Keller during a dustup in the police parking lot, is all the fuel the grieving father needs to confirm his guilty verdict. Dealing with what he feels is a futile police force as the days tick away and the odds of finding his daughter alive decreasing, the man who was caught unprepared improvises. That's how Alex ends up a prisoner in a dilapidated apartment building Keller inherited from his father, being beaten merciless every day until the mentally incompetent young man gives up information that he may not even have. "He knows where they are. I see it in his eyes" Keller keeps insisting, maybe more to himself than anyone else. But if that were true, why isn't Alex talking? And what connection is there between the disappearance, the dead body Detective Loki found in the basement of a priest and the suspicious figure who fled from the scene the night of a candlelight vigil for the girls?

Prisoners is an interesting film, a by-the-numbers thriller that works even though it shouldn't for a few reasons. Part of that is due to great performances from leads Jackman and Gyllenhaal who both add an intensity to characters that on paper are neither exceptional nor unique in how they stand out from other vigilante or solitary detective archetypes in other thrillers. The traits that are supposed to identify and distinguish Keller and Loki as our leads from the get go—the financially strapped carpenter and the lawman who eats Chinese alone on Thanksgiving—don't factor significantly into the narrative after the groundwork has been laid. But the fact that we're invested in the work of both—one being more noble than the other—speaks to what both actors bring to their parts. When you have a supporting cast the likes of Viola Davis, Terrence Howard and Maria Bello, the leads have to be excellent in order to just keep up.

Were the performances anything less than stellar the taut thriller would be a significant drag through which to slog. Clocking in at just a shade under 160 minutes, Prisoners is surprisingly efficient in how it doles out plot points. Just when momentum begins to slow, a new development arises that, if not game changing, at least makes the next few minutes worth watching in how things and people are altered in the new light.

In the best tradition of all good thrillers, there is a place and purpose for every hint and every piece of evidence introduced, even those that seem to be tangential and/or largely forgotten in the twists and turns of the lengthy runtime. That everything is tied up neatly and all the setups are paid off is a credit to the screenplay from Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband), but the question of how satisfying all those answers are is another story. Some things get wrapped up a bit too neatly in a film that is anything but and adding to the troubles are religious implications as troubling as those from M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. Keller is depicted as a mostly faithful man, opening the film with a prayer, tuning in to Christian radio, and even asking God for strength while he's torturing Alex.

That Keller stumbles over "as we forgive those who trespass against us" in The Lord's Prayer is the film's most honest and insightful look into how a man of faith reconciles (or doesn't) his beliefs and his actions, but the film's diegetic reminders of affliction and atonement would lead viewers to believe that either Keller or the God he purportedly follows is irrevocably vengeful. If you wish to believe that Prisoners is a film with room for hope and redemption ("hope for the best"), then this conclusion is unquestionably troubling, but if faith is to be discarded along with Keller's morality ("prepare for the worst") then perhaps the reason the film is called Prisoners rather than Prisoner alludes to how one father's earthly actions will echo in eternity.