Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners opens on a prayer. Keller Dover, played by Hugh Jackman, recites the Lord’s Prayer with his son during a hunting trip, then tells the boy to be ready. It is Thanksgiving in Conyers, Pennsylvania, and the Dover and Birch families sit down to dinner together. By nightfall, two six-year-old girls are gone. What follows is not a whodunit. It is a study of what a father becomes when the police cannot give him an answer fast enough.
Prisoners runs 153 minutes and carries a tagline that tells you exactly where its head is: “How far would you go to protect your child?” The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2013, and reached theaters on September 20. It grossed $122 million worldwide against a $46 million budget. The National Board of Review put it among the top 10 films of 2013. Roger Deakins took an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Two Families, One Empty Chair
The setup is plain. Anna Dover and Joy Birch go missing after playing on a parked RV. Detective Loki, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is called to an RV matching the description and takes the man inside into custody. That man is Alex Jones, played by Paul Dano. The film never shows what charges, if any, come of it.
Interrogation goes nowhere. Loki works out that Alex’s diminished IQ prevents him from planning a kidnapping, and the RV holds no forensic evidence. The police release Alex to his aunt, Holly, played by Melissa Leo.
Keller does not accept it. He assaults Alex outside the police station. In that moment, Alex whispers something to him.
They didn’t cry ’til I left them.
That line is the hinge of the whole film. It is also the only evidence Keller ever gets, and it is worth nothing in a courtroom. Loki finds no proof behind it. Keller kidnaps Alex anyway and takes him to an empty building he owns.
Keller Dover’s Empty Building
From here, Prisoners stops being a search and becomes a torture story. Franklin Birch, Joy’s father, played by Terrence Howard, helps Keller against his own judgment. The two men hold Alex in the building and hurt him for information about their daughters.
Franklin nearly lets Alex go. His wife Nancy, played by Viola Davis, talks him out of it. Then the Birches make a second decision: they will not stop Keller, and they will not call the police. That choice is the film’s real subject. Two ordinary parents, given a chance to pull back, choose the man with the pipe.
Villeneuve does not let the audience off either. Keller is not a monster in the usual sense. He is a man who has decided that procedure is a luxury he cannot afford, and the film keeps the camera close enough that his logic stays legible even as his actions get worse.
Loki and the Maze
Gyllenhaal’s Loki is the counterweight, and he is not a genius. He works missing-children cases in Conyers going back before his own time on the job, which leads him to a woman whose child vanished years earlier. At a vigil for the girls, he approaches a suspicious man who runs. Loki puts out a sketch of him.
That suspect then breaks into the Birch and Dover houses. Grace Dover, Keller’s wife, played by Maria Bello, hears him and calls Loki. Loki tails Keller to the empty building. Keller claims he goes there to drink. Loki searches and does not find Alex.
The suspect turns out to be Bob Taylor. Loki takes him into custody at his house, where the walls are covered in maze drawings. The film does not say what becomes of the case against him. The maze is the film’s clearest image, and it is not subtle: a puzzle with one path out, drawn by a man who cannot explain it.
The Priest and the Corpse
Prisoners keeps widening its map. Loki runs down local sex offenders and finds a corpse in the house of a priest, Patrick Dunn. Dunn admits he killed the man after that man confessed to murdering 16 children for his “war on God.”
It is a strange detour, and it does real work. It tells you that the evil in Conyers predates the Dover and Birch families, and that the system meant to catch it has been failing for a long time. It also gives Loki something Keller never gets: a confession, freely given, from a man who chose to act outside the law for what he believed was a good reason.
What the Cast Does With It
Jackman plays Keller at a volume that would sink a lesser film. He is a man whose grief has no outlet, so it comes out as violence, and Jackman never asks you to like him. Dano does the harder job. Alex is a suspect who cannot defend himself, cannot explain himself, and may or may not be guilty. Dano keeps him unreadable without making him a blank.
Davis and Howard are the film’s conscience, and they have less screen time than the story needs. Their decision to look away from what Keller is doing lands because Davis makes Nancy’s fear specific rather than noble. Bello has the smallest arc of the four parents and the film does not quite know what to do with Grace once the search starts.
Deakins shot it, and the nomination was earned. Prisoners is gray, wet and close. Interiors are lit like interrogation rooms even when nobody is being questioned. The camera rarely gives you a clean look at anything, which is the point: nobody in this film, including the audience, gets to see the whole picture.
Where the Film Overplays Its Hand
The runtime is the first problem. At 153 minutes, Prisoners has room for the priest subplot, the maze drawings, the vigil, the sketch, and Bob Taylor’s house. It does not need all of them. The middle stretch sags under leads that exist to prove Loki is working hard rather than to move the story.
The film also stacks its symbols too neatly. The maze, the RV, the whistle, the prayer — each one is placed with a care that starts to feel like the film pointing at itself. Villeneuve is a patient director, and patience is the right instinct here, but patience and length are not the same thing.
Then there is the ending. Prisoners does not resolve so much as stop, and it asks the audience to supply the last beat. That is a defensible choice for a film about faith and doubt. It is also a way of avoiding the cost of the story it spent two and a half hours building. The film is willing to make Keller a torturer. It is less willing to sit in the room where that ends.
What Prisoners Leaves You With
Prisoners is a serious film that mostly earns its seriousness. It takes a premise built for a thriller and refuses to let it stay one. The abduction is the engine, but the subject is the moment Keller decides the police are too slow and the law is too small, and every scene after that is about what that decision costs.
The performances carry the weight. Jackman and Gyllenhaal are the two poles of the film, and the film is smart enough to make neither of them the answer. Dano’s Alex is the question the whole thing turns on, and the film never cheapens him into a victim or a villain. That restraint is worth more than any twist.
What holds Prisoners back from being the film it wants to be is bloat and a refusal to finish. The priest, the mazes, the long middle — these are the marks of a director who does not yet trust his own material to land without help. He would learn. Villeneuve’s later work shows a filmmaker who can hold a mood for two hours and still know when to cut. Here, he has the mood and not yet the discipline.
Still, the mood is extraordinary. Deakins makes Conyers feel like a place where it has been raining for years. The film’s best scenes are quiet ones: Keller and Franklin in the empty building, Loki walking a hallway of maze drawings, Nancy Birch deciding not to make a call. Those scenes do not need the tagline. They answer it.
Prisoners is one of the better American crime films of its decade, and it is not a masterpiece. It is a 7 of 10 — a film with a great first hour, a strong cast, and a last act that mistakes ambiguity for resolution. Watch it for Jackman and Dano. Watch it for the way Villeneuve and Deakins make a suburb feel like a trap. Do not expect the ending to pay you back for the time you spent getting there.
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