Prisoners

I found myself with this film playing on my laptop with quite little information about it and unclear expectations. It was just one of the titles that showed up in some of my typical early year seachs: "Best Thriller films 201X", "Best Drama films 201X", "Best Horror films 201X"...

It didn't start too well. The archetypical American family: religious, living in one of those neighbourhoods of single-family houses where you need your car even to go to buy the newspaper, with a father (a Hugh Jackman very concerned about getting ready for the end of the world) that has just taught his teenager son (very concerned about how to buy his first car) to hunt a deer... Well, you know that I'm a proud European (even more now that I'm living in France), so the "American Way of Life" is almost that alien and disturbing to me as the "Saudi Way of Life". OK, I have to say that this family are close friends with an AfroAmerican family, which is not a so "American thing", as however much they now have a black president (a black president that continues to invade countries under the pretext of "peace and democracy" as aggressively as his "WASP" predecessors did), my understanding is that both communities continue to be seriously disconnected (and what to say of the "Brown" (latin) community...) Well, enough hate for the USA for today, let's focus on the film.

So, both families come together for Thanksgiving day (yet more American stuff...) and during the afternoon their 2 little girls get abducted. Not satisfied with how the police is carrying out the investigation, one of the 2 fathers (Hugh Jackman) decides to put matters in his own hands, but the whole thing goes out of control and the victim turns into monster. I won't give more details, just will say that as the film draws on, what could have been just one more entertaining film turns into an excellent one. The plot develops masterfully and unexpectedly, facing us with the moral struggles of 2 tortuous souls.

Once finished I felt prompted to check what other films this director had worked on, finding out that this man is the genius that directed Incendies and Polytechnique 2 absolutely breathtaking works. Indeed, one can find some common ground between Prisoners and Incendies, being the religious factor the most notable to me. From the "War for God" in Incendies (that sequence when a Christian Lebanese militia executes a group of innocent muslims and we can see an image of Virgin Mary glued on the machine gun of one of the executioners is one of the best representations of human misery that I've come across in a long while), to the "War against God" of the murderers in Prisoners, intending to make people to lose their faith through the exposure to a horror and injustice that a benevolent God would never allow.

The DVD release of this film was announced on many French kiosks last week. In the advertisement they compared it to Seven. Well, I wouldn't have come up with such relation on my own, but indeed it's not misguided, though Seven remains at an upper level that very few films can reach.