Is torture ever justifiable?
A twisty, compelling, brilliantly acted (if sometimes difficult to watch) thriller, “Prisoners,” asks this question not in the usual contemporary context — anti-terrorism — but instead as a gruesome option deployed as a response to every parent’s worst nightmare.
Hugh Jackman gives the performance of his career as Keller, a macho Pennsylvania carpenter who goes extreme vigilante when the cops are forced to release the only suspect in the disappearance of his 6-year-old daughter and her friend from their quiet suburban street after Thanksgiving dinner.
Alex (Paul Dano), a creepy 20-something who is said to have the IQ of a 10-year-old, was arrested on the night of the disappearance, driving an RV that the missing girls were seen playing near. But cops can’t find any physical evidence linking him to the abduction, and he’s let go after 48 hours behind bars.
Keller, however, is convinced that a cryptic remark that Alex made to him — which nobody else heard — is incriminating, and that if he doesn’t take the law into his own hands, the girls will soon perish in captivity. Keller snatches Alex, locks him up in an abandoned apartment building he owns, and begins trying to hammer a confession — or at least the girls’ whereabouts — out of the terrified suspect.
At the same time, a different approach is being taken by Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal, like Jackman in career-best form), the no-less-driven, gonzo police detective who’s in charge of the investigation. Flouting the rules, he searches the home of a drunken priest with a past (Len Cariou) and turns up the mummified corpse of a bound man in the basement — the priest says the man had admitted a series of child murders 26 years earlier.
French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, making his English-language debut after the Oscar-nominated “Incendies,” keeps you guessing and on the edge of your seat with a film where nothing is quite is what it initially seems — and where another creepy young man surfaces as a second suspect an hour in.
Without giving away anything essential, by this point Loki is not only trying to find the missing girls but also trying to figure out whether Keller’s increasingly suspicious behavior — he frequently leaves his wife (Maria Bello), who has her own mental health issues, alone for the night — has anything to do with Alex’s disappearance.
Not everything in Aaron Guzikowski’s script seems strictly credible. I especially doubted whether Keller could enlist — however briefly and reluctantly — his neighbors, the other missing child’s parents (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) into his increasingly grisly homemade rendition program, which includes scalding showers for Alex.
You could probably level the same accusations against “The Silence of the Lambs,” another intense police procedural that was nevertheless so utterly gripping that you could easily suspend disbelief.
Villeneuve does a great job of modulating the mood (including some gallows humor) of a film that seems headed toward one conclusion, then veers toward another over 2¹/₂ of the fastest-moving hours I’ve seen in a recent movie.
Justly Oscar-nominated for “Les Misérables” last year, Jackman doesn’t have to sing at the top of his lungs with a camera pointed down his throat this time. But he does a brilliant job of painting a seemingly unlikely character (a Christian survivalist with a black best friend) and maintaining a surprising degree of audience sympathy — and complicity — when Keller does the unthinkable.
Gyllenhaal, so good in last year’s underseen “End of Watch,” matches him stride for stride as Loki, who sports a huge neck tattoo and, like Keller, is battling his own personal demons. There is also terrific work by Dano and Oscar winner Melissa Leo as Alex’s guardian — both playing characters whose motives the film repeatedly challenges the audience to sort out.
“Prisoners,” which never preaches about morality, builds to a surprising conclusion that gratifyingly defies Hollywood formula. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, though, for parents of young children or anyone squeamish about fairly explicit scenes approaching torture porn films like “Saw.”