After his daughter disappears, a religious man takes drastic action against a mentally handicapped boy that he believes kidnapped her.
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Ohhhhh man. I’ve been thinking about this movie for weeks for some reason, and finally decided to REVIEW it. I ended up watching the Bluray twice in one weekend, even though it’s a pretty difficult watch. Big spoilers for this movie follow.
Roger Deakins’ cinematography is so beautiful looking that there were certain points that I thought I was watching a 4K disc. With this camera work and the slow burn of the plot to rescue the missing children, Villeneuve created an almost unbearably intense movie, with oppressive dread building every minute. A dark energy pervades this film, making it hard to look away from. Right at the start, Hugh Jackman’s character says that under pressure, people will turn on each other, which is exactly what happens.
This is a film about mazes, puzzles, and the people trapped in them. It’s much more than your average police thriller, nearly everyone in the movie is imprisoned in some way. Jackman is trapped feeling helpless that his daughter was taken, Gyllenhaal is trapped in the task to find her, the girls are of course abducted, Paul Dano is trapped in his slow intelligence and then physically detained by Jackman, Jackman’s neighbor Terrence Howard is trapped by his knowledge of Jackman’s torture but feels powerless to stop it, the mysterious Bob is jailed by his dark past of being a kidnap victim himself, Jackman’s wife is nuked by her medications, and the killer is trapped by her desire to make other families feel the way she did when her son died of cancer.
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Gyllenhaal worked on the character of Detective Loki mostly on his own. He came up with the idea of having the character having a “hard blink” as a facial tic. I think it works super well, like a quiet visual indicator of extreme intensity going on just under the surface. The Freemason ring, cross tattoo on his hand, Pagan 8-pointed star neck tattoo, and Zodiac-finger tattoos were Gyllenhaal’s idea. For the cross tattoo especially, this feels like it was done by an amateur because of its simplicity. Maybe the character got it in juvenile detention. The iconography does a lot of lifting for his background, and we dont get a lot of that in the film. Really the only glimpse we get is that he growls to a retired priest that he was at a boy’s home, so we get an idea that he had a rough childhood. To me, the tattoos and the inherently religious Freemason ring seem like that was Loki’s way of figuring things out as he went along. I take a little bit of issue that the writer gave the character the name “Loki” - it just calls too much attention to itself. I think it works better as a callsign.
Not to skimp over the other castmates, as they’re all really good - Paul Dano yet again plays a weirdo in playing the orphaned mentally challenged guy. Dude can’t help but take these roles. Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood, etc etc. Dano has admitted that he enjoys playing these roles, being darkly interested in them. Hugh Jackman is his typical Ultra Intense Mode, but this really may be one of his best, rawest performances. There are a few parts where the audio peaks because Jackman is yelling, but Villeneuve left it in the final cut - my guess being that it actually lends itself to the scene.
So the plot is, two girls, including Jackman’s daughter, are kidnapped. He is hellbent on the idea that it was Paul Dano, who was operating an RV in the area when it happened. This is cemented in Jackman’s head when Dano whispers something to him in a scrum of reporters - “they only cried when I left them”. In desperation, he kidnaps Dano to an abandoned apartment. This is actually the apartment where Jackman’s character’s father killed himself, so it has all sorts of meaning and implications for him (and the plot). Jackman did a few takes where he would yell at and threaten Dano in the bathroom. Villeneuve then told Jackman to be “completely ferocious”, and in the next take, Jackman pulverizes the sink with a hammer, ending the take by crashing it into the wall right next to Dano’s head. To his credit, Dano barely flinched, without knowing what Jackman was going to do. It’s a crazy scene.
Jackman’s character’s name, “Keller”, is actually a German word, meaning “cellar”. His character literally and figuratively descends from a Bible-beating prepper - and a carpenter - to a violent thug, at one point praying after torturing Dano. In a brilliant use of cinematography, Keller’s wooden cross on his truck rearview mirror is shown unmoving and static at the beginning of the film. As things get darker, another shot has this cross swinging wildly, indicative of the character’s shaken faith. At the end of the film he is literally in a cellar, his lowest point.
The hot shower scene is horrible, as steam escapes from a small vent where he’s being scalded. Not seeing the torture is worse than watching Jackman beat him up, and there is flat-out incredible (incredibly disturbing) camera work here.
Trees are a major theme in this movie. We start in the trees with Jackman hunting with his son, and later the community walks through woods to find the girls. There are many shots of characters in cars with trees reflecting through the windowglass, representing their chaotic mindset.
Then there is, of course, the most mysterious shot in the movie. We get a little backstory and familiarity with the families, then we get 30 seconds of a tree. Just a camera dolly-in, pushing into a large tree in their front yard. No dialogue, just some ominous sounds in the audio, and zooming into a tree.
It actually gave me goosebumps the second time I watched it.
I think this is basically just to convey a mood. If I were to push it a little further, one could say that trees serve as silent witnesses to violence. At the start of the movie, the trees watch as Jackman’s son shoots a deer. Later, they are the only witnesses to the actual kidnapping. Of this (in)famous shot (the producers on-set were pissed that Villenueve was taking 2 hours shooting a tree while Hollywood actors were in their trailers wondering what was going on), the director said:
“They’re [the trees] are kind of like ghost characters. …They’re always there, at least in the background. Each scene you can feel their presence. And they are linked with this idea of necessary violence.…We were always trying to express things with as few shots and saying [on the surface] as little as possible... This shot was designed not to be understood, but to be felt. It has a subconscious feeling that can vibrate in your soul. [It functions] like a dread, an omen. It's like when you suddenly have a bad feeling but you don't understand what it means, it's linked with intuition."
This is the second time that Villeneuve has used a Radiohead song in a conspicious fashion - he used You And Whose Army in Incendies. Here, he uses Codex at the very end of the movie. God damn does Radiohead have movie-able songs.
Here’s some of Deakins’ work in the film. I love this damn “Beauty Of” channel on Youtube.
This is a gripping, disturbing movie that has become one of my favorites of all time. It’s a great movie for when it’s cold outside, as long as you’re prepared for a rough ride. Prisoners will stay with you long after the credits roll.