Prisoners Review

Villeneuve's American debut is a kidnapping thriller built as a moral test the audience keeps failing. Hugh Jackman plays a survivalist carpenter who abducts and beats a man of limited understanding for days, and the film's cruelty is in how carefully it stacks the odds so that part of you wants him to keep going. Jake Gyllenhaal's detective is the counterweight, a man solving the case properly while the parents solve it wrongly, and Villeneuve cuts between the two methods without ever telling you which one he prefers.

Roger Deakins does career level work here, Pennsylvania in permanent November, wet asphalt and bare trees and interiors lit like an interrogation, and the opening deer shot sets the whole film's moral weather in twenty seconds. The trouble is the third act, which needs a solution and reaches for mazes, snakes and a basement that belong to a pulpier movie than the one being made. Gyllenhaal's blinking and neck tattoos are affectation the script never explains. The last sound in the film, though, is perfect.