Prisoners

Things are dark and gloomy in the Commonwealth. It is November, torrential rain freezing to sleet and, then, snow with skies universally leaden and someone has abducted two little girls. Denis Villaneuve's harrowing thriller, "Prisoners" (2013), depicts a series of grisly events triggered by the abduction -- in the course of the film there is graphic torture, abuse of animals, suicide, deoomposing corpses, and lots of foul weather. The girls are kidnapped away from a Thanksgiving celebration involving two couples. The father of one of the girls is a religious survivalist and, when the police release a prime suspect, a creepy,mentally retarded 27 year old man, he captures the kid and tortures him, unsuccessfully, to extract information as to the whereabouts of the missing girls. Hugh Jackman plays the fundamentalist survival-nut and captures very precisely the self-righteous and self-justifying tenor of the man -- this is the kind of fellow who perceives his way of life under assault, imagines himself as a victim, and can't perceive the possibility that he is mistaken. More disturbing is the other couple -- although overtly law-abiding and rational, they go along with the torture scheme and, in fact, are complicit in its savagery. The movie is long and intense; it is certainly a gripping experience, although whether this tour of horrors can be described as entertainment is, perhaps, problematic. The film is beautifully shot and composed by the great Roger Deakins and the picture represents classical Hollywood storytelling -- building a narrative with clearly presented and atmospherically powerful pictures -- at its finest. There is none of the cheap handheld camera-work, jiggling to make things seem documentary. Rather the camera glides ominously through dark woods, slides across the waters of an icy millpond, and rummages with grave portent through rotting buildings and derelict backyards. The camera is effectively, and unobtrusively placed, the takes are the right length, the acting is superbly naturalistic, and the movie isn't marred by excessive, intrusive close-ups. The flaws in the film relate to its fundamental influence -- Nordic noir of the Henning Mankell variety. All too often, the picture looks like a scarier and more effectively shot version of the PBS show "Wallender" -- we have the same brooding skies, the same tormented loner hero, the same Gothic plot involving child murder and sex abuse and religious fanaticism. The movie is also clearly indebted to picturs like "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" -- in fact, the hero, who has a conspicuously Nordic name (Loki), is covered with ugly, disturbing-looking tattoos. "Prisoners" rotates around various scenes of confinement -- the retarded kid, beaten beyond recognition isconfined in a kind of "tiger cage" and scalded; a corpse rots in a black cellar under a church observed by plaster casts of the Virgin Mary, prisoners are kept in an underground oubliette with a car parked over its plywood cover. There are many fine naturalistic details -- the retarded kid casually strangles his pet dog before releasing the animal (everyone tortures everyone else) for its walk, Loki slips on ice while rushing one of the girls to the hospital, and the set design and locations are vividly real. The film errs on the side of excess -- it loads horror upon horror, including in one over-the-top scene, a hundred slithering snakes and a decapitated pig's head -- this is David Fincher "Seven" material and doesn't fit well. This stuff is florid and unconvincing and, in fact, distracts from the pitiless and relentlessly grim theorem of the plot. And from one perspective the film is profoundly annoying -- it's catnip to Hollywood types to make a film in which religious people are depicted as hypocritical monsters, pedophiles and sadists: there is a wicked Catholic priest, the survivalist gun-nut father is pious and always reciting prayers, the villains turn out to be Evangelicals who have slipped into total madness and the little girls are abducted to the tune of "Put your Hand in the Hand of the Man from Galilee". the programmatic nature of this attack on religion is made obvious by the fact that Loki is some kind of religious syncretist -- his body seems to be covered with tattoos emblematic of various faiths (Buddhist, a pentagram on his neck, a cross on his fist, Sanskrit scribbled on his knuckles.) Accordingly, organized and established American religion is portrayed as evil and fanatical, while Loki's searching cafeteria-style faith is presumed to be virtuous. The movie is sufficiently powerful, however, to over-rule these cavils.