( EW.com ) -- Steve McQueen 's 12 Years a Slave is an agonizingly magnificent movie : the first great big-screen dramatization of slavery . Based on actual events , it begins in 1841 and tells the story of a free black man from Saratoga Springs , N.Y. , a musician named Solomon Northup ( Chiwetel Ejiofor ) , who walks around in a natty gray suit , secure in the courtly modesty of his life as a husband and father of two . But then he accepts an offer to go to Washington , D.C. , with a pair of traveling entertainers , and when they 're out at a restaurant drinking wine , we get the queasy feeling this is too good to be true . It is . Solomon is n't being hired for his talents . He 's being trafficked . He wakes up in a cold , stark prison cell , with a spiderweb of chains shackling his arms and legs . The traffickers have drugged him and are sending him down to Louisiana , where he 'll be sold into slavery . Gazing at his chains as if he were in a bad dream he simply has to wake up from , the brilliant Chiwetel Ejiofor places us right inside Solomon 's skin , and instantly we 're sharing the horror this man 's life has become . Ejiofor may have the most eloquent eyes of any actor now working . They are orbs of pure expression , and in this movie they need to be because Solomon can rarely speak what he 's feeling . What we read in his intensely private thousand-yard stare is the agony of a man robbed of freedom , but also the renunciation of despair . Whatever happens , he will persevere and survive . He will know misery , but he will not fall into the trap of madness . He will transcend . The scalding power of McQueen 's artistry begins with this : He uses the fact that Solomon was n't born into human bondage to draw us into the experience of slavery . Solomon has to learn to answer insults or bear whippings with silence , to pretend he 's a toady who ca n't read or write , and the cruelty of that process becomes the film 's way of dramatizing the unnaturalness of slavery . Is it just Solomon who 's really a free man ? No , every slave is . 12 Years a Slave is based on a book Northup wrote about his ordeal , and McQueen , working from a superb script by John Ridley , has structured the film as a diarylike series of incidents . There are no trumped-up arcs to pad out what we 're watching . The crushing reality of Solomon 's day-to-day existence is all the drama the film needs . Solomon 's first slave owner ( Benedict Cumberbatch ) reveals a few humane instincts — as much as a slave owner 's behavior can be called `` humane . '' But then , after showing too much pride , Solomon gets sold off to Edwin Epps ( Michael Fassbender ) , a seething plantation owner who 's a kind of diabolical psychologist of sadism . He can see the fire in Solomon 's heart and is driven to break him . When he learns that Solomon has tried to get a white laborer to send a letter north , he holds Solomon 's face close , saying he knows what 's going on , and Solomon defuses the situation with an ingenious lie that he must sustain for minutes on end , without a tremor , staring his overseer right in his taunting eye . This is virtuoso filmmaking that lays bare the degraded relationships with a terrifying intimacy . Edwin has a consuming obsession with Patsey ( Lupita Nyong ' o ) , the slave who picks more cotton each day than any other slave ( 500 pounds of it ) and whom he regularly rapes . Their `` relationship '' becomes part of a debased triangle , since Edwin 's wife ( Sarah Paulson ) is aware of his fixation . Due to her jealousy , and to Edwin 's disgust at his own desires , Patsey is subjected to the torments of hell . Lupita Nyong ' o 's performance is shattering . She goes to a place of private terror and communion beyond pain . When Edwin is whipping Patsey , McQueen plays a startling trick : He holds on the image of Edwin brandishing the whip — a Hollywood cliché — and then , as we 're lulled into that familiar `` it 's only a movie '' mode , the camera , without a cut , spins around to show the obscene violence of the whipping . The mortification of flesh hits us in the solar plexus . It 's Ejiofor 's extraordinary performance that holds 12 Years a Slave together . He gives Solomon a deep inner strength , yet he never softens the nightmare of his existence . His ultimate pain is n't the beatings or the humiliation . It 's being ripped from his family , blockaded away from all he is . 12 Years a Slave lets us stare at the primal sin of America with open eyes , and at moments it 's hard to watch , yet it 's a film of such emotion that in telling the story of a life that gets taken away , it lets us touch what life is . Grade : A . See the original story at EW.com . CLICK HERE to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly . © 2011 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved .
Chiwetel Ejiofo stars in the Steve McQueen directed film . Hide Caption Reviewer says `` This is virtuoso filmmaking ''