Review: Prisoners
It feels like this writeup has been a long time coming. If you’re a faithful listener of the podcast, you’ll know that Hugh Jackman has an uncanny knack for popping up in conversation. What’s more is that I harbor a longstanding affinity for crime stories, true and otherwise. PRISONERS delivers on all fronts.
PRAY FOR THE BEST
This story opens with a prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” we hear as a doe treads lightly through a snowy wood. Bang. She’s felled. And we’re given a face to the prayer — a man and his son hunkered down in fluorescent orange. Keller Dover is a working man of simple means and a spiritual bent; a protective father and husband who loves his family and saddles his life with boy scout ideals like, “always be ready” and “pray for the best, prepare for the worst.” Keller encapsulates something of a quintessential father figure in the semi-rural, blue collar suburb. When the Dovers visit family friends for dinner just a few houses down the lane, their youngest children want to play. It’s about as innocent as it gets and the whole affair is almost picturesque. There’s not much fuss about the girls going out as long as they bundle up and have a little supervision from the older siblings. It’s just smart. But as the evening winds down, 6 year old Anna Dover asks if Joy can help her look for a missing red emergency whistle back home. Sure. Fine. It’s a short walk, just ask your brother to come along. But she doesn’t. And just as quickly as Keller’s snow-dappled prey hit the forest floor, his world crumbles from beneath.
It may be cliché to use words like, “a parent’s worst nightmare” but a missing child is surely an unthinkable dread. Well, maybe they just went back to — no. The basement? The swing set? No. “Well, they’re getting whupped when they get home,” the parents joke with unease because surely this will all be sorted by bedtime. Wait, what about that RV? What about the conspicuous RV just sitting on the side of the road when the girls first when outside to play?
One emergency call later and we meet Detective Loki, a moderately irritable, albeit fastidious, officer with a perfect batting average of solved cases. Law enforcement quickly locates the RV and takes into custody the unstable driver within. While one might be tempted to arrive at a foregone conclusion given the sinister appearance of circumstance, this is where the madness begins. You see, there’s no evidence. Not a single shred or cotton fiber to suggest the girls were ever abducted and held captive in the world’s most beige RV. And it’s no John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer we’re talking about here, either. The young man seems to be little more than a damaged kid with the mind of a 10 year old. Not exactly the next serial killer… right? The blatant lack of hard evidence to back up
PREPARE FOR THE WORST
The truck stereo fuzzily squawks at an overwrought father. “Trouble and affliction are what we have all reason to expect in this world. Man is brought into trouble, not as man, but as sinful man, who was in transgression. Man born in sin and therefore born to trouble.” If the cops can’t seem to find a lead and get some answers, what’s left? What can he do? Or perhaps more accurately, what wouldn’t he do for the safe return of his daughter? The man always prepared, now the man made helpless, resolves to take matters into his own hands with the only threads of suspicion and belief he has to hold onto. This time, however, his target isn’t as certain as a deer in the forest. There is no hunting license for vigilante justice. It’s a murky proposition without a great deal of assurance, but that doesn’t seem to be of particular concern as he clamors to be the hunter — to have control — once again, paying abduction for abduction in a turn of events that gives violent meaning to the film’s title.
But exactly how far can you go? What can you justify? How much can your conscience bear?
The trouble that tests Keller’s faith and the affliction he doles out with vengeful words and bloodied fists challenges whether he’s still deserving of our faith. It’s a narrative tool that puts me in mind of FIRST REFORMED under the most harrowing of circumstances. Not only does it compromise your trust in Keller, it shocks you from sympathetic understanding to horror, jarring an uncertain hope from one flawed character to the next, making even a detached detective look like a regular tattooed saint.
The truth is, it’s easy to forget that part about “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” when all you’re left holding onto is desperation and pain. To brandish your own form of justice presents the elusive feeling of righteousness with all the baggage of revenge, and it’s a conflict that rests at the very center of Keller’s being. He makes strained these efforts to excuse the human wreckage in his wake, to project the creeping guilt, and invoke some form of divinely-approved purpose in his pursuit of the truth — but the pain is ever before him. And as such, pain is ever before us as we bear witness to the warpath of a man who could entrust justice to none other than himself. But could we? Regardless of where we find our hearts, a singular truth is made clear: not every prisoner is confined by a physical cell.
WRAP
With every scrap of information that comes to light, a dozen questions are raised. I’ll confess, for a fleeting moment I thought I was putting the pieces together faster than the detective, connecting the dots and escaping the preverbal maze as the plot snaked from drama to mystery with heart-pounding urgency; but the climax dropped like a sack of bricks and left me in as much shock and awe as ever.
I thought I was simply going to watch a more grounded iteration of TAKEN where a father goes above and beyond for the safe return of his daughter. Instead, my heart sat anchored in the pit of my stomach as the pursuit of justice stretched beyond the pale. PRISONERS masterfully delivers a ceaseless, looming dread, leaving you to grasp for suspicions and straws, torn between what feels right and what might be defensible. “What can you live with” is poignantly painted against “what you can’t live without” on the emotionally raw canvas of a father’s heart.
