Brutal and harrowing, but ----

Rating: 7/10 (2 February 2014)

Steve McQueen spares the audience no detail of the appalling brutality of the plantation owners. Michael Fassbender's flogging of the slave he's been regularly raping (Lupita Nyong'o) is as savage as anything Mel Gibson has put on screen, and Paul Dano's psychopathic overseer is almost more disturbing than Fassbender. Chiwetel Ejiofor's solid performance as Solomon anchors the film, but compared to Spielberg's epic AMISTAD and more recently Tarantino's vivid DJANGO UNCHAINED, there isn't a great deal of story here. At the end we're told what happened to Solomon, but the fate of his fellow slaves, like poor pathetic Patsey, is left for us to conjecture. 12 YEARS A SLAVE is a harrowing 19th-century prison drama (OK, a false imprisonment drama) but it doesn't actually add anything to our knowledge of the inhuman evil that was slavery (and still is in parts of the world we're not encouraged to mention).