Lashes the soul

Rating: 9/10 (16 June 2015)

This is one of those films that leave you sitting in your theatre seat long after the curtains close and the lights go up.
To say it has impact is an understatement.
Set in Pre-Civil War America, it's the story of a free African American man, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), from New York who is kidnapped and forced into slavery in the South. He is held for 12 harrowing years before regaining his freedom.
The things he endures and sees makes this a horror story; more shocking than any with a supernatural theme because it's true. And there's the thing, one could shield oneself from the effects of this movie if you discovered it was simply a filmmaker's exaggeration of a less sensational piece of history.
However that isn't the case, it's actually very faithful to the book Northup wrote about his experiences, substantiated in large part by other sources. The things we see happen to Northup happened; the things we see happen to Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) really happened (only they were probably worse), and there really was an Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) and his wife (Sarah Paulson).
As a piece of filmmaking it is hard to fault this one, and it deserves all its awards. The time and the period are caught beautifully and in many ways, the camera acts as a dispassionate observer. Hans Zimmer's score also captures a sense of the sad inevitability of it all as the tragedy unfolds.
We have seen slavery from this period depicted before, but this film brings home how entwined the lives of the slaves and their white masters were – there is no sense of separation of the whites in their mansion houses from the hundreds of slaves working in the fields and living in their ramshackle quarters. The plantations shown in the film seem smaller with fewer slaves, and the two groups seem to live cheek by jowl; they know each other well.
This is a film that will stay with me. Although it shows that not all the slave owners were cruel, "12 Years a Slave" demonstrates the truth of the old maxim that while power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.