‘Prisoners’: Kidnap flick holds you with top actors, high tension for much of run
September 25, 2013
The title “Prisoners” is multifaceted in meaning, referring primarily to two young girls who are kidnapped off the street of a rural Pennsylvania town on Thanksgiving Day, but also to the parents of those kidnapped girls who grow frustrated with the sputtering police investigation and take matters into their own hands – they take a person of interest captive – as well as the homicide detective who is tripped up constantly by the interfering parents and an unsupportive higher-up, and the burnt-out working-class town that has suffered through decades of tragedy.
It’s a broad net, probably broader than screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (the Brockton native who penned “Contraband”) intended, but the material in the hands of Denis Villeneuve (whose haunting 2010 exploration of arcane family roots in the Middle East, “Incendies,” garnered an Academy Award nomination) is narrow, focused and rife with tension. That’s the gift and bane of “Prisoners”: eternal, dark bleakness. Take either of David Fincher’s serial killer flicks, “Zodiac” or “Se7en,” and you’d have a good idea what Villeneuve is shooting for. Continue reading
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