Revisiting Prisoners

Prisoners is a guilty pleasure of mine. Its shortcomings are as obvious as its color palette is grim, and its messaging is as subtle as a hammer blow to the head. It is an oppressively dark police procedural, a maze of ruin and decay populated by villains with horrible motives and so-called heroes with horrifying methods. It gives us a safe and controlled environment to experience the horrible, thrilling rush of having someone we love taken from us to God knows where by God knows who to endure God knows what. With a glimpse of its secrets and a whiff of its rot, this movie forcefully captures the moral and societal decay of the stories we tell our kids to keep them from wandering too far from home.

Thanksgiving Day was supposed to be a time of cheer and fellowship for the Dover and Birch families, but it turns into every parent's worst nightmare when the youngest daughters of both families vanish after a creepy RV rolls through the neighborhood. Luckily, RVs aren't that hard to track, and the police trace it to a local gas station to nab the driver, the cognitively impaired Alex Jones. But the girls are nowhere to be seen, the lie detector tests don't work on someone who doesn't understand the questions, and a once-promising lead quickly crumbles into ash. Keller Dover, the desperate father of one of the kidnapped girls, isn't convinced that Alex is innocent, and when he launches his own inhumane investigation into the whereabouts of his daughter, rules are broken, trusts are violated, and boundaries are tested to the point where kinder souls will be broken by the forcefulness of more anguished ones. This is a difficult movie to watch.

Think of it as Criminal Minds with an obscenely large budget. Comfort-food cinema is not always a bad thing, and this specimen keeps tugging at your curiosity with one morbid, ambiguous development after another, a torturously long gaze into the face of a slow, decaying death. Set in suburban Pennsylvania (though it was shot in Georgia), Prisoners invades the places we think of as "safe" and turns them into a hostile playground where the only children to be found are probably already dead, if not half-mummified. It sometimes overstates its case, but the weight of this investigation and the implications of it failing were never lost on me. Prisoners feels important.

It is about its characters, and they're a mixed bag of overwrought tendencies and moments of true genius. Jake Gyllenhaal's Detective Loki is the best of the bunch, a lonely cop who you sense could have just as easily turned into the men he hunts for a living. Keller is a canvas for a desperate anger that many men will understand, and Alex is a distant-eyed, conflicting figure who embodies many of the doubting questions this movie raises. The typecasting and occasional emotional monotony are issues, but the acting remains good from start to finish, and I never doubted the movie's sincerity. That's a loaded fact.

You see, Prisoners is smotheringly serious. Its very opening moments feature Keller intoning the Lord's prayer as he and his son aim a rifle at a deer in the woods; boom, the deer goes down, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Thanksgiving Dinner. Its color palette is comparable to The Black Phone, a muted and gloomy world that almost seductively flaunts the abject terror of a vulnerable loved one being kidnapped. Roger Deakins's cinematography is an absolute masterstroke, an understated and muted portrait of an otherwise overstated story. It's spookily liminal.

Deakins brings his signature touches to strong visual storytelling that repeatedly conveys simple yet effective implications without a single word, though both it and many other elements of Prisoners fall prey to a very heavy-handed religiosity that manifests in its dialogue, symbolism, and themes. This movie is not subtle, though that works to an extent. The late Johan Johannson's string-heavy score works both with its strengths and weaknesses in special ways, tugging at the heartstrings just as effectively as the cinematography tugs at the eyes. While this may sound vague and poetic, it has the presence of a ghost trying to tell you something, even though it doesn't have the voice to do so.

Maybe this is because I'd already watched the movie and could crack the case in reverse, but anyone paying attention to Prisoners will probably be able to solve it before the movie is even halfway over. It ties its disparate pieces together seamlessly to make one big picture, but those pieces leave a trail, and the final villain is not terribly difficult to guess. But no one will tell you those pieces aren't interesting. The world of this movie is a rainy, gray, and wildly intoxicating maze populated by mentally and emotionally tormented creeps and weirdos, a museum exhibit of the horrible things that lie just below the world we take for granted. It runs the gauntlet that other mysteries before it have, but does so with a panache none of them could imitate.

Altogether, Prisoners is a flawed detective thriller with a moldy, crumbling texture that strikes far too close to home for comfort. Watching it is like watching someone unearth a mummy in Pennsylvania. Sometimes, it is but inches away from crossing the line into the realm of gore videos, but its more restrained elements always step in as timely as can be to keep it in check. The enigmatic Detective Loki is its greatest strength, something of a representation of its stronger elements because of his restrained, occasionally odd personality quirks. Prisoners may be off the mark with a noticeable amount of its topical darts, but in terms of Loki and its other stronger tendencies, it really hits the bull's-eye when it counts.

Prisoners - 7/10

Matthew 6:9-15