A Grim Fairy Tale

Rating: 10/10 (16 October 2013)

The best way to see "Prisoners" is to go in cold, not knowing anything, and be surprised and excited by every new twist and turn. I knew very little and had moderate expectations, so that when the early event – every parent's worst nightmare, the kidnapping of children – occurs I was seized by dread and anxiety which didn't let up until the final moment in the film. I see too many movies that don't really engage me, so it was thrilling to watch a movie that so completely held me in thrall.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays the cop assigned to the case. He's intuitive and methodical and has a history of solving all his cases. It doesn't help, though, that the father (played by Hugh Jackman) of one of the little kidnapped girls, impatient with the cop's M.O., decides to take matters into his own hands. He's a good man who does something unspeakably bad, and what he ends up doing morally rips him apart. This turns the movie from being merely a police procedural into something altogether different, and makes it really interesting. There are monsters in the movie – and in the world – and they're not the big bad wolf living off in the woods, somewhere. Sometimes they live among us, in nice tidy little houses down the street – or maybe they lurk inside us.
I was afraid that the story was going to be too convoluted and that there were going to be gaps in logic (it's a testament to how involved I was in the movie that, for awhile, I was on edge about this) but these were tidied up to my satisfaction. One critic I read thought the movie was way too long, but I wasn't bored for an instant. "Prisoners" is exactly as long as it needs to be. I liked director Denis Villeneuve's careful and methodical pacing, slow and suggestive fades and preoccupation with mood (all of which, for me, increased the suspense). There were moments when this movie messed with my head.