An intense desperate feeling

Rating: 8/10 (22 September 2013)

I saw the late night showing of Prisoners last night at the Alamo Drafthouse Richardson, TX. I was instantly sucked into the beautiful yet gritty cinematography and the director made me feel as if the little girls that were kidnapped were my own and that I was running out of time to find them. I love it when a director has the ability to draw in the audience in such an emotional way.
Possible spoiler alert beyond this point:
Prisoners is about two families with children in a nice suburban neighborhood that meet at one of their houses for a dinner party to unwind and enjoy each others company. Each family has a six year old daughter. The two young girls ask if they can go fetch something that they left at the other families house which is a couple of blocks away from the other families home, but they tell the little girls that they must have the older siblings permission and for them to accompany the small kids to the other home. The little girls don't ask the older kids to come with them and end up vanishing completely. The two families become very frantic and worried when they discovered that the little girls were playing near a really dirty, ran down looking RV from decades past. The police are notified, and then detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) accepts the case to find the missing girls. The police find the RV parked at a gas station at the edge of the woods. The police move in and arrest a very strange mentally disturbed, childlike man in his early 30's (Paul Dano). After long interrogation, the man is released and the father of the young white girl (Hugh Jackman) becomes enraged and decides to take matters of finding his daughter into his own hands. The film now becomes a desperate race against the clock to find out what has happen to the missing girls. Desperate measures are enacted and the parents of these children must decide how far they are willing to cross the line in order to find their kids.
I would imaging that this film is very disturbing and frightening to parents of small children. I am not a parent, but I am an uncle of a 3 year old boy, and I would do the same thing Hugh Jackman did for sure.
I would recommend this film to people that enjoy intense dramas, but spoiler alert: this film will make you crazy with emotion, and there is a lot of crying and freaking out from the parents of the little girls.
I rated this film 8 of 10 because I thought the ending could have been better. The film was a perfect 10 until the last 5-10 min.
I would like to note that Paul Dano who plays Alex is a very talented actor and he plays Alex so well that you forget he is an actor and not really a mentally disturbed victim/ kidnapper.
This film shows how the kidnappers brainwash their victims with LSD & Ketamine cocktails. (that should answer everybody's questions about how can a kidnapped person identify with their kidnappers and not run away. It's because the strip their mental image of who they are with the drugs)
Lastly, I was kidnapped when I was 2 years old (1985) at Richardson Square Mall in Richardson, TX while my mother was shopping. I was later re-united with my family. So this film really hit home about what could have happen to me.