‘Prisoners:’ The proper Thanksgiving film to show into that panic spin

The parade is over. The plates have been cleared. The household is gone, and also you’re full. Not simply on turkey, mashed potatoes, and no matter cranberry atrocity is conventional to your clan, but additionally simply full up on the vacation cheer. Positive, there’s loads of humorous Thanksgiving TV specials to bask in, family-friendly Belcher antics to binge-watch, and even Christmas motion pictures to marathon. However perhaps you are hungering for one thing darkish and grim. For this acquired style, I like to recommend biting into Denis Villeneuve’s twisted crime-thriller, Prisoners.

Why? Nicely, for starters it is seasonally set.

Prisoners is a Thanksgiving film from the beginning.

Prisoners begins on a Thanksgiving that nobody on this quiet Pennsylvanian city will quickly overlook. This can be a place of cozy Americana, the place neighbors collect collectively for the vacation feast and produce to the desk good manners, heat, and the freshly slaughtered venison from the deer snagged whereas searching. Proud patriarch Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) is deeply dedicated to his household, doting on his younger daughter and intently instructing his teen son {that a} man’s position is as protector, it doesn’t matter what.

So, when his little woman and her greatest buddy Pleasure go lacking — mockingly whereas in quest of the “safety whistle” pricey previous dad gave her — it shatters one thing inside Keller. As his spouse (Maria Bello) crumbles into despair, he can not go away this missing-persons case as much as the police. So whereas headstrong hotshot Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) chases down leads each winding and grotesque, Keller tails his personal prime suspect (Paul Dano). However this leads him down a slippery slope of vigilantism, vengeance, and potential damnation.

Hugh Jackman roughs up Paul Dano in “Prisoners.”
Credit score: Moviestore / Shutterstock

Lengthy earlier than delving into the world of Dune, Villeneuve completely stuffed this movie with heralded performers, together with David Dastmalchian, Terrence Howard, and Academy Award–winners Viola Davis and Melissa Leo. Every actor sinks their enamel right into a drama that oozes with grief, remorse, and virtually radioactive rage.

Prisoners is a story of rage and vengeance.

This intense ensemble engages in a sport of cats-and-mice that entails stalking, drugging, battery, torture, and extra. But Prisoners shouldn’t be about grisly spectacle. Aaron Guzikowski’s riveting screenplay asks the query: Within the face of your worst nightmare, how may you behave?

Whereas every efficiency is robust (much more so on a rewatch), the grudge match right here shouldn’t be between Keller and the person he believes took his baby. It is between Keller and Loki, two tough-as-nails males who need the identical factor however take radically completely different routes to getting it.

Within the face of your worst nightmare, how may you behave?

The growling wrath Jackman channeled into Wolverine feels extra harmful on this context, most likely partly as a result of an R-rating implies that the movie shouldn’t be restrained by the MPAA’s requirements with regards to intense on-screen violence. However Prisoners shouldn’t be a lot visually gory as it’s psychologically disturbing. Over the week its story spans, we’re helpless witnesses to a good-hearted household man who transforms into an impulsive monster within the face of what he cannot management. Although Villeneuve doggedly grounds the movie in life like settings and with a tooth-gritting tone, Prisoners is partly a fable about how wild the world could be, even in our personal entrance yards.

Gyllenhaal is the proper foil to Jackman, delivering a efficiency that is nonetheless fed by anger, however a colder, extra calculating sort. Positive, Loki is the type of cop who may bend a rule or tough up a suspect in a match of shock. However between the 2, he appears positively monkish in his calm. Littered in tattoos beneath a shirt that is fiercely buttoned up, Loki is a stark distinction to the flannel and beard of Keller’s masculinity. One is best at preserving his emotions hidden and his demons at bay, however it doesn’t suggest he does not perceive the battle. This commonality throbs on the core of Prisoners, whispering a warning about how fragile religion and civility could be within the face of true horror.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman face off in “Prisoners.”
Credit score: Moviestore / Shutterstock

Maybe you have loved Denis Villeneuve’s bold two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, and so that you’re searching for one other difficult epic to sink into. Then, Prisoners ought to be that decide. It is a movie that enables you a protected area to work out concern and nervousness a few world gone mad. However be warned: It will not present consolation, solely validation.

Past the grisly hook of little women snatched, past the highly effective performances of a staggeringly stacked solid, there’s additionally the masterful unfolding of a thriller that is too tough to be predicted. Just like the labyrinth imagery that emerges all through, this story winds and weaves, typically drawing tremulously near the central reveal, then seeming to swerve down one other lifeless finish. The final word answer is complete and, ultimately, alarmingly easy. It was a rush to expertise this reveal the primary time in theaters again in 2013, and it is a rush now. As a result of even in the event you bear in mind bits of this film — and even vividly recall its breath-snatching finale — you will get caught up within the journey another time. And that flip your abdomen will make hits onerous as ever.

So, curl up in a heat blanket, chill, and let the chills wash over you.

Prisoners is now streaming on Max.