12 Years a Slave Review

McQueen's method is to hold. Solomon Northup hangs from a tree with his toes barely reaching the mud while, in the deep background, plantation life continues in the same unbroken shot, and the horror is that nobody intervenes for minutes of real screen time. Sean Bobbitt shoots the Louisiana bayou in soft, almost pastoral light, which makes the violence land as an obscenity inside beauty rather than as a genre register. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Northup as a man rationing his own intelligence for survival, and the moment he finally joins a work song is the performance's hinge.

Lupita Nyong'o's Patsey is the open wound; the whipping, staged in a slow circling take, is unwatchable by design. Michael Fassbender gives Epps a drunk's unpredictability that never curdles into camp. The screenplay occasionally reaches for a period formality that flattens characters into positions, and the rescue arrives with a suddenness the structure has not earned. Nothing else in this register has the nerve to simply keep the camera running.