Dark vision with high tension

Rating: 8/10 (5 March 2014)

For quite some period of time no other thriller film gave us the opportunity to exceed the level of our expectations that much as "Prisoners". If we take into account the fact that the whole genre is characterized by a small share in the overall production, scarce production budgets and minimal promotion, no wonder that we rarely get more than a medium-quality generic job work. However, the Prisoners' pedigree implicitly suggested that that could yield something much more interesting. The starry cast leaded by Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal together with a promising Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve and scenario writer, Aaron Guzikowski, definitively have brought some new blood in a stagnant genre.
The plot of Prisoners intertwined with dilemmas and intriguing reversals maintains a high level of tension throughout the whole 153-minut period. The search for the lost girls leads us through dump houses, depressive landscapes, endless rain, cold, from a clue to a clue just to end up in a vicious circle and falling down deeper and deeper into hopelessness under a watchful eye of sophistical-dark vision created by the director of photography Roger Deakins. And while the solution starts to stumble in the attempt to find the connection between the clues, the skepticism retreats under a strong atmosphere dominated by the contrasts of light and dark bringing about a surreal space – a space where the battle between good and evil is fought . Precisely the emphasis placed on that dimension allows the film to pass beyond the limits of the whodunit framework and places the work above an average thriller.