The world as prison

Rating: Null/10 (24 March 2014)

This seemed at first like it would prejudge sin and redemption, pitting a father's virulent worldview of a fallen world that you have to prepare against and be ready to kill to protect loved ones against a senseless evil that seems to justify it. So I was surprised to find more.
It's anchored, on one end in the thriller with clear mechanics that goes back to Fritz Lang, the modern intuitions about space on the other. Jackman and the other actors inhabit the first, Deakins finds his room in the second. In one mode evil is concrete, in the other elusive. Seven was in the first, Zodiac more in the second, the film traverses both. Here we start with the disappearance of two girls and gradually acquire a story. Two men are struggling to, father and cop, one goes on faith the other reason. One and then a second culprit appear, somehow connected.
The whole idea, eerily effective, is that we build loci of observation, that we have enough observation at any time only to justify a faith about what we convince ourselves to be true, either of the boys being guilty, so in being yanked from one to the other and back that faith is shaken and shakes our grounds of truth and humanity. Innocents suffer as a result. Meanwhile evil is something so banal and in plain sight, the more horrifying suggestion, also seen in the location of the makeshift prison(s).
The thriller worked for me more than most in recent memory, but the most striking moments were in the second mode, the visual and elusive. As the girl's memory comes to her in the hospital bed, we have three or four shots that communicate that whole range, each of them expertly timed, each blurry in some way. And the manic driving to save the girl in time, here we have her soul between worlds, his rush to redemption, visually transcendent in the night traffic of this world.
Overall it paints a tormented picture; evil, originally a shattered faith as we find, exists out there, we come close to knowing, the father, the cop, the kid who sketches mazes, but something eludes us in the way things are made, which can be as simple as the father not being able to make himself believed about what he heard in the parking lot, and as complicated as what he heard not being what he thinks.
So I'm not in line with the glum worldview, I am somewhat with the latter, the difficulties of faith and clarity, tied to watching.
It's a Christian vision to be sure, the world as prison, faith inescapably woven with sin. Interestingly, that pessimism emerges in the Christian mind as you move away from the early days and the "father's" coming is delayed. I followed the other day a link to an article about Christian leaders professing the religious significance of Aronofosky's upcoming Noah, how it makes the old story vibrantly relevant for a modern audience. I'd like to see them confront this, which really demands confrontation.