Wanna know something? I'm bored of the Oscars. Last time the Academy Awards moved the needle for me, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD were battling for best movie. Movies that are both smart and disturbingly violent are still being made, you know? This year's glaring omission to the Oscars is PRISONERS, the first Hollywood venture of Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. I knew Villeneuve was a talented man, but directing important actors into creating an understated, tense and psychologically draining movie was quite the big market upstart for him. PRISONERS is a complex movie that requires patience and focus, but that is rewarding every step of the way.
Two young girls (Erin Gerasomovich and Kyla Drew Simmons) disappear during a Thanksgiving dinner. They go outside while their parents are having conversation and don't come back. The only lead the police has is a suspicious RV that was parked near the Birch family's house. It's not long before assigned detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds the RV and it's oh-so-suspicious driver Alex (the wonderful and underrated Paul Dano). When local police is forced to let Alex go due to lack of proofs, one of the missing girls' father Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) decides to take fate in his own hands and force a confession out of Alex. This only makes the case more complicated for everybody involved as time is playing against the girls.
Now, creating such a tense, suffocating movie relies primarily on three things: 1) a great script 2) showing restrain in artistic direction and 3) great acting. PRISONERS has all three variables going for itself. I was the first surprised how major, jack-of-all-trades actors were able to mesh with the movie. Hugh Jackman, in particular, has a sneaky difficult role. He plays a decent, righteous and emotional man who is not very bright. Most actors would've portrayed one side or the other, yet Jackman embraces the dual nature of his character and creates this fundamentally good guy who you can never really root for. His co-star Jake Gyllenhaal was almost equally impressive as he transformed himself into something foreign to Prince of Persia. Both actors play with a dramatic restrain I didn't knew they had.
Not the Prince of Persia.
But the showstopper in PRISONERS is the bleak, downplayed direction. Denis Villeneuve knows what he's doing. PRISONERS is not exactly a sensory overload, yet every frame is savantly studied to render draw the maximum from what it is trying to communicate. Bleak lighting, cramped framing, sets that slips details about the characters, things like that. It's something I usually appreciate of the Coen brothers, but Villeneuve does it in PRISONERS. Another important point about PRISONERS, is that it doesn't fall into a common trap of bleak movies. It is not bleak for the sake of being bleak. It keeps its eyes on the prize. It is first and foremost a mystery and it'll keep you guessing until the very end.
I had a great time with PRISONERS. It's a stimulating movie that speaks to you as an intelligent person. It's a movie that puts mystery over entertainment, because it trusts its mystery to be entertaining and rightfully so. It got ignored for the Academy Awards, probably because it's not some pseudo-intellectual, soulful-yet-safe entertainment. It's a movie that aims to take your soul. It's funny because Denis Villeneuve's INCENDIES was nominated for an Oscar a few years ago and it's just about the most gut-wrenching thing. Anyway, like I said, I'm bored with the Oscars. I hope you understand a little better why. Go see PRISONERS, it's intense.