PRISONERS

This is every parent’s worst nightmare – two little girls, best friends, are kidnapped from outside the house while their parents (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello, and Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) relax inside after Thanksgiving lunch.

The obvious suspect is Paul Dano, who had been lurking in a camper van just down the road. But when arrested by detective Jake Gyllenhaal, Dano has nothing to say and anyway turns out to have the mentality of a 10-year-old, so he is released.

This is where Jackman really gets going. Here is a man who not only prepares for the worst but clearly expects it to happen any time soon, as the copious emergency rations in his basement testify. He is alpha male, the protector of his family, a recovering alcoholic and now convinced that Dano is guilty and consumed with frustrated rage that the guy has not been charged, he in turn kidnaps him and, initially with Howard’s help, imprisons him in a deserted house and constantly beats him to a pulp to make him reveal where the girls are.

Here an interesting thought arises: is this a subtle allegory of the war against terror and the efficacy and moral justification (or otherwise) of redaction and torture? Maybe. In any event none of it works this time. Dano remains stumm.

Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal is doggedly on the case, questioning known sex offenders in the area and following various clues, most of which turn out to be red herrings. Bits of possible evidence turn up, the body of a man who claimed to have killed 16 children is found in a church, another suspect commits suicide.

In the process we learn that Dano, an orphan, lives with his aunt, Melissa Leo, whose husband had walked out on her. We also learn, or anyway suspect, that the occasionally twitching Gyllenhaal has dark memories of his own.

In a sense all these people are prisoners – Dano certainly, the girls possibly, even their families who seem to be trapped in a charmless, characterless suburb somewhere in Pennsylvania where in winter it either rains or snows all the time.

This is a long film, 153 minutes, but it doesn’t seem so. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve moves it onwards at a brisk pace, deftly intercutting between the activities of Gyllenhaal and Jackman (in a most unusual role for him), both of whom give first-rate performances.

Several critics hated it but I can’t see why. Admittedly, it’s a dark, bleak tale with a few loose ends and an explanation for the girls’ kidnapping that is hardly convincing. And with the exception of Melissa Leo the women involved have pretty thankless tasks, especially poor Maria Bello, who is asked to do little but weep or fall into a drugged sleep.

But despite such shortcomings it does grab your attention, is cleverly directed and edited and Roger Deakins’s cinematography is excellent. Believe me, the drab, freezing Pennsylvania his camera shows us is really not somewhere you’d want to live.