Great Cast

Rating: 6/10 (15 March 2015)

12 Years A Slave', based upon Solomon Northup's 1853 autobiography is, as the subject matter would suggest - a freeborn black-man being kidnapped and sold into bondage as a 'Georgia Runaway - pretty grim. The underrated Chiwetel Ejiofor conveys the controlled fury of the hero as he struggles to survive in a society where he is solely considered a commodity. The only problem with the narrative - and this is something I first noticed when I first read the book, in my teens - is that many of the white characters seem like caricatures of Southern cruelty and disdain. This is, of course, an interesting inversion of the depiction of black characters in the literature of the day. It is to the credit of many of the supporting cast that they come convincingly to life. Benedict Comberbatch's Mr Ford is a study in kindness blighted by moral cowardice, and the paranoia and psychosis of Michael Fassbinder's Edwin Epps is a genuinely unsettling, and all too believable, real-life monster. A nicely understated and utterly heartbreaking performance by Lupita Nyong'o, as the molested slave Patsey, is worth the ticket price, alone. Well worth a look.