Prisoners (2013 film)

Prisoners is a 2013 American thriller film directed by Denis Villeneuve from a screenplay written by Aaron Guzikowski. The film has an ensemble cast including Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo, and Paul Dano. It is Villeneuve's first English-language feature film.
The plot focuses on the abduction of two young girls in Pennsylvania and the subsequent search for the suspected abductor by the police. After police arrest a young suspect and release him, the father of one of the daughters takes matters into his own hands. The film was a financial and critical success, grossing US$122 million worldwide. It was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2013, and at the 86th Academy Awards, it was nominated for Best Cinematography.
Plot.
In Pennsylvania, Keller Dover, his wife Grace, son Ralph, and daughter Anna celebrate Thanksgiving with their friends Franklin and Nancy Birch, and their daughters Eliza and Joy. The four children go for a walk, and Anna and Joy play on a parked RV. After dinner, the two go missing. Detective Loki responds to a police call that an RV matching the description is at the edge of the woods, and arrests the man inside, Alex Jones.
During interrogation, Loki realizes Alex's diminished IQ prevents him from planning a kidnapping and learns that his RV contains no forensic evidence of the missing girls. Loki runs down leads on local pedophiles and finds a corpse in the house of Father Patrick Dunn. Dunn admits to killing the man after he confessed to murdering 16 children for his "war on God".
The police captain releases Alex to his aunt, Holly. Convinced of Alex's guilt, Keller assaults him outside the police station, where Alex whispers to him, "they didn't cry until I left them". After Loki finds no proof of this, Keller kidnaps Alex. Along with a very reluctant Franklin, Keller begins to torture Alex in an empty building Keller owns.
At a vigil for the girls, Loki approaches a suspicious man who flees. Loki releases a sketch of him to the community. The suspect sneaks into the Birch and Keller houses. Grace hears him and calls Loki, who learns while responding that Keller spends his nights away from home. He tails Keller to the empty building, where Keller claims he goes to drink, but Loki doesn’t find Alex. Loki tracks down the suspect, Bob Taylor, at his house. The walls are covered in maze drawings and Loki opens crates filled with snakes and bloody children’s clothes.
At the police station, Taylor confesses, and Loki discovers he was abducted as a child. As Taylor draws detailed mazes, Loki assaults him and demands the location of the girls. Taylor grabs an officer's gun and kills himself. Loki shows the Birch parents and Keller photos of the bloody clothes, and they identify several as Joy's and Anna's. Later Keller tells his son that they aren’t dead.
Keller continues torturing Alex, who cryptically talks about escaping from a maze. Keller visits Holly, learning that Alex's intellectual disability comes from a childhood accident involving the pet snakes her husband kept. While devoutly religious, Holly and her husband lost their faith after their son died of cancer, and adopted Alex as a way to cope.
Loki matches the maze pattern in Taylor's drawings to a necklace worn by the corpse in Dunn's house. At Taylor’s house, Loki learns that many of the bloody clothes were store-bought and soaked with pig blood. Below a window outside the Dover house, Loki finds Taylor’s footprints and the same kind of sock Keller identified from Taylor’s house.
When the drugged Anna and Joy attempt an escape, Anna is caught while Joy gets away. Joy is found and hospitalized. When Keller grills a woozy Joy for information, she remembers little, but tells him, "you were there; they put tape over my mouth". He rushes out, realising that she had seen him at Holly’s house, when he visited to apologize for assaulting Alex outside of the police station. Loki gives chase and travels to Keller's building expecting to find him, but instead finds Alex.
Keller goes to Holly’s, telling her, "I don’t want to have to hurt you", but she pulls a gun. She explains that before her husband disappeared, they abducted children as part of their war on God to avenge their son's death, and to create demons out of the traumatized parents. Alex was their first abduction, Taylor their second. Holly imprisons Keller in a hidden pit in her yard, where he finds his daughter’s whistle.
Loki enters Holly’s house to inform her Alex has been found. Seeing a photo of the late husband wearing the same maze necklace as the corpse in Dunn's basement, he searches for Holly, who is giving Anna an injection. Loki and Holly exchange gunfire, leaving Holly dead and Loki injured. Loki takes Anna to the hospital.
A recuperating Anna and Joy visit a bandaged Loki in his hospital room to thank him. Loki returns to Holly's house, where he faintly hears a whistle blowing.
Production.
Aaron Guzikowski wrote the script based on a short story he wrote, partially inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", involving "a father whose kid was struck by a hit and run driver and then puts this guy in a well in his backyard". After he wrote the spec, many actors and directors entered and exited the project, including actors Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio and directors Antoine Fuqua and Bryan Singer. Ultimately Guzikowski would credit producer Mark Wahlberg for getting the project on its feet, stating, "He was totally pivotal in getting the film made. That endorsement helped it get around." Principal photography began in Georgia in February 2013.
Reception.
Box office.
"Prisoners" premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and was released theatrically in Canada and the United States on September 20, 2013. It was originally rated NC-17 by the MPAA for substantial disturbing violent content and explicit images; after being edited, it was re-rated R for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout. "Prisoners" opened in North America on September 20, 2013, in 3,260 theaters and grossed $20,817,053 in its opening weekend, averaging $6,386 per theater and ranking #1 at the box office. After 77 days in theaters, the film ended up earning $61,002,302 domestically and $61,124,385 internationally, earning a worldwide gross of $122,126,687, above its production budget of $46 million.
Critical response.
On review aggregator web site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 81% based on 251 reviews, with a rating average of 7.27/10. The website's critical consensus states: ""Prisoners" has an emotional complexity and a sense of dread that makes for absorbing (and disturbing) viewing." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 53 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore initially gave the film a grade "B+" on an A+ to F scale, but Warner Bros asked for a recount by the service and later said the film received a grade "A–".
Christopher Orr of "The Atlantic" wrote: "Ethical exploration or exploitation? In the end, I come down reservedly on the former side: the work done here by Jackman, Gyllenhaal, and especially Villeneuve is simply too powerful to ignore." Ed Gibbs of "The Sun Herald" wrote: "Not since "Erskineville Kings", in 1999, has Hugh Jackman appeared so emotionally exposed on screen. It is an exceptional, Oscar-worthy performance." Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" wrote that Gyllenhaal was "exceptional" and that "Villeneuve takes his unflashy time building character and revealing troubled psyches in the most unlikely of places."
The film was a second runner-up for the BlackBerry People's Choice Award at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, behind "Philomena" and "12 Years a Slave". Gyllenhaal received the Best Supporting Actor of the Year Award at the 2013 Hollywood Film Festival for his "truly compelling, subtly layered" performance as Detective Loki.
Reviews have not been all positive. Writing in "The New Republic", David Thomson declared that the film was "weary after ten minutes" and furthermore "hideous, cruel, degrading, depressing, relentless, prolonged, humorless, claustrophobic, and a mockery of any surviving tradition in which films are entertaining". A mixed review came from Sheila O'Malley of RogerEbert.com, who gave the film 2.5 stars out of a possible 4. She wrote that Jackman's performance grew "monotonous" and that the film sometimes verged on pretentiousness, but was redeemed by a few excellent suspense sequences and Gyllenhaal's performance, whose "subtlety is welcome considering all the teeth gnashing going on in other performances".
Top ten lists.
"Prisoners" was listed on various critics' top ten lists.
Soundtrack.
The "Prisoners" soundtrack, composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, was released on September 20, 2013.