Prisoners (2013)

Denis Villeneuve’s dark film about obsession is not his best, but story’s complexity makes for a riveting tale.

prisonersUSA
3.5*

Director:
Denis Villeneuve

Screenwriter:
Aaron Guzikowski

Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 155 minutes

The final minutes of Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s sombre Prisoners are as dark and thrilling as anything that precedes them, but their impact could have been infinitely more powerful had Hugh Jackman’s character not been so incredibly thick.

Jackman plays Keller Dover, a manly family man with a remodelling and repairs business who in the film’s opening scene accompanies his son, Ralph, on his first deer hunt and does his best to make the youthful teenage boy feel he is now in some way being initiated into manhood. Keller tells Ralph how his father used to always be prepared for everything, good or bad. In other words, a real Boy Scout. Of course, he will soon face a situation he has no idea how to handle.

But there is something off about Keller. He is intensely serious about everything, his body literally taught with tension, and in a pivotal scene early in the film, when he is searching the house and we get the first glimpse of his basement, the camera lingers just long enough for us to notice a gas mask hanging in the corner.

Halfway through the film, when we return to the basement, we get a better view of the neatly arranged stock on the shelves and have the disturbing impression Keller is a survivalist. Prisoners doesn’t elaborate – the film is more show than tell, and you need some patience for this simple yarn spun out over two and a half hours – but one questions what purpose this information serves our understanding of the plot’s central event, other than to make us increasingly uneasy.

This central event is the abduction of Keller’s and his wife’s young girl, Anna, together with Joy, the young daughter of the Dovers’ friends, the Birches, with whom they spent Thanksgiving when they thought the children could quickly go back home to look for an SOS whistle.

Villeneuve already signals in a scene very early on that we should be suspicious of a caravan that is parked in the neighbourhood. We cannot see who is inside, but we know it is an ominous vehicle because we get at least two shots from the point of view of someone unknown on the inside. Luckily, Ralph sees the caravan, and when his sister disappears, he mentions it to his parents, who inform the police.

The police track down the caravan soon enough, but the driver, the young man Alex Jones, seems to be either on drugs or otherwise handicapped, and as he tries to flee, he rams the vehicle into a tree, obviously making his involvement in the disappearance of the girls seem all the more likely. But with him clamming up, the police thinking he is merely mentally handicapped, and the law requiring either arrest or release after 48 hours of detention, he is let go, which angers Keller to no end.

This is where he takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of his daughter’s disappearance. But life is not so simple, and while we have grave suspicions that Alex had anything to do with the abduction, one or two tiny but not insignificant moments make us question what he is thinking, or at least what he has seen and may not want to share because of whatever fear he has.

In the end, the film turns out to be infinitely more complex than we may have anticipated, and there are countless incidents or images that seem to be loose ends – or worse, dead ends – that we may never tie together. But slowly, things fall into place. The theme of a maze, made visible by one particular loony whom we and the police notice once word spreads of Anna’s and Joy’s disappearance, is very appropriate here.

The major investigating officer is Detective Loki, and as played by Jake Gyllenhaal there is some trace of his character in Zodiac, as the normally cool and rational individual becomes very attached to the investigation, to the point where he may very well take the law into his own hands if he feels it is not proving to be effective enough on its own.

As the snow falls in rural Pennsylvania and hope disappears of ever finding the two innocent girls, the action escalates, mostly due to Keller’s and Loki’s growing obsession with finding the perpetrator of the crime. However, Keller’s obviously strained relationship with his wife (we almost never see the two of them together in a scene) and Loki’s past, which we can surmise has been filled with sadness even though we have no idea what is at the root of this sadness, are left unexplored by the film, and ultimately leaves us more unattached to the narrative than we ought to have been.

Villeneuve has made some wonderful films in the past, including the widely acclaimed Incendies and the extraordinary Polytechnique. Both of them were violent films, but they were told with great style and a sense for telling a story in an interesting way. Although Prisoners is far from those highpoints, it is a work most directors would be proud of, and despite the slow pace of the storytelling (we only grasp the meaning of the title almost right at the end thanks to a newspaper headline), it remains a strong presentation of an investigation where leads seem to be in such short supply.

Son of Saul (2015)

Tight focus, searing details and a wholly original approach combine to produce one of most powerful Holocaust films of all time in this début feature film of László Nemes.

son-of-saul-fiaHungary
4.5*

Director:
László Nemes 
Screenwriters:
László Nemes 
Clara Royer

Director of Photography:
Mátyás Erdély

Running time: 105 minutes

Original title: Saul fia

The world didn’t know it needed another Holocaust drama until Son of Saul (Saul fia) came along. Focused on one lone protagonist – the titular Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Hungarian – for its running time by blocking out almost everything around him through shallow focus and an aspect ratio that is close to a square, the film is 105 minutes of pure immersion in the tension that pervades a concentration camp (press materials state it is Auschwitz, but this is not evident to the outsider) towards the end of the Second World War.

The opening is breathtaking, as Saul approaches us in a blurred shot of a forest landscape until his face appears in a sharp close-up. For the next few minutes, we follow him, swinging from the front to the back, over his shoulders, as a train arrives, and the latest group of Jewish prisoners offload their belongings and make their way into the camp. His face does not betray a single emotion. However long he has been here, he has been hardened by his experience, and he goes about a range of unthinkable duties with the robotic dedication of a drone. And yet, there are signs that underneath the surface, he is fully aware of the savagery all around him.

In one of the film’s first scenes, we see a group of prisoners, likely the ones who arrived in the opening scene, led to the showers. Saul, wearing a coat with giant red X on the back, which means he belongs to the exclusive Sonderkommando burdened with cleaning the gas chambers after executions have taken place, among other ghastly chores, stands to one side. We see the doors closing, and soon the screaming starts. The screams become shrieks, and the shrieks turn to wails, before silence announces death. When the doors open, the bodies are dragged outside, and the victims’ clothes, neatly hung in the cloakroom, are ransacked for anything that glitters. Saul covers his nose and mouth with a thin piece of cloth to ward off the stench of the deceased.

But there is a slight groaning among the heap of corpses, and it belongs to a young boy. The doctor examines him, listens to his wheezing chest, and then grabs his head, closes his nasal passages and puts a hand over his mouth. Within seconds, the boy stops breathing. Saul sees all of this, and inside him, something breaks. He desperately looks for any identification among the pile of clothes, but he finds none. Later, he asks the doctor not to dispose of the body after the autopsy.

Despite Saul’s lack of visible emotion, we learn over time that the boy is his son, or that he thinks the boy is his son. This piece of information seems utterly far-fetched, not only because the boy was serendipitously the only survivor from the group but also because the group of prisoners did not even come from Hungary. Nonetheless, Saul is determined that the boy be given a proper Jewish burial, and he spends the rest of the film trying to track down a rabbi who would say Kaddish, a prayer in honour of the dead.

Many of the scenes consist of a single take, or what feels like a single take. It bears mentioning at this point that this is director László Nemes’s début feature – a fact that seems astounding, given the obvious challenges of choreographing the actors as well as the camera as they move through a variety of spaces. Nemes’s experience with film does include, however, a stint as assistant director on The Man from London (A londoni férfi) by Béla Tarr, famous for his use of long takes.

This approach to his story is tremendously effective, and even though some of the takes include long stretches without dialogue, there is not a single dull moment in the entire film. On the contrary, the viewer becomes more and more tense as the story continues to develop. Nemes accomplishes this task by focusing on the details without showing them explicitly. The tight locus that is Saul is the point from which we glimpse the chaos around him, and while there are no real establishing shots anywhere in the film, it is clear this is hell on earth.

From piles of ash (cremated bodies) being shovelled into a lake to prisoners lining up next to a pit to be shot point-blank the one after the other, the things we see here – sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly – are gruesome and will haunt many a viewer. And yet, the filmmaker never goes for spectacle, because the brief events here are always extensions of the horror that is all around Saul, and by their presence, they help us to comprehend what it is from which he seeks to escape.

Son of Saul is a tour de force like few others. It keeps the viewer guessing, not only about the trajectory but about the nature of the chaos taking place in front of our very eyes, and is without question a Holocaust film that ranks among the very best ever made.

Viewed at the 2015 San Sebastián International Film Festival