Prisoners - movie review
625 views · Published 20 September 2013 · 1:47 · Indexed 1 October 2026
Channel: The Boston Globe · 2013 · Film & Animation
How weighed down with solemnity is "Prisoners"? Check the title, which refers not only to the two missing girls that set the plot in motion, or the suspect that one victim's father has chained to a sink. It takes in all of the characters — the frenzied parents, the haunted detective, the shattered young men who may or may not have anything to do with the crime — and, by extension, it includes each of us as well, prisoners to our passions and blind to the big picture That sounds like an awful lot for a thriller to carry, and at two and a half hours, "Prisoners" often groans under the load of its own importance. But Denis Villeneuve's film — the Canadian director's first feature since 2010's Oscar-nominated "Incendies" — is as gripping as it is grueling, with performances that swing for the fences and a central mystery that seems an unresolvable tangle of knots until those knots come undone in a somewhat forced final act. Villeneuve is aiming for the brass ring of "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Zodiac" — films that eclipse their genre to touch on larger matters — and he comes pretty close. "Prisoners" carries its weight. It also taps into every parent's worst nightmare: two little girls (Erin Gerasimovich and Kyla Drew Simmons) who vanish from a rural Pennsylvania street while their respective parents are socializing on a rainy Thanksgiving. A detective named Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is brought in, and the more volatile of the fathers, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) — a macho carpenter with survivalist tendencies — urges the cops to find a mysterious RV seen cruising the area earlier. Taken into custody, the driver of the RV, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), proves to be a shell-shocked young man with the mental faculties of a 10-year-old. See more at: http://bit.ly/14qBfA0 Like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/boston Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/BostonDotCom Follow us on Google+ https://plus.google.com/+BostonDotCom/posts
