🎬 #122 Prisoned By The Frame.

We’re all prisoners to something and if you’ve managed to earn your freedom from everything else, the last prison wall remains our bodies. This week’s two films deal with being kept locked up in two very different ways. One actually, one metaphorically. The first film is quickly becoming a movie that, as soon as someone mentions it, I want to watch - joining the ranks of The Insider or Zero Dark Thirty, two films I could endlessly rewatch.

Happy choosing, happy viewing

Bry

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FILM ONE: PRISONERS

2013 Dir Denis Villeneuve
2 hrs 33 mins

Almost every character in this film is a prisoner. Parents to grief, detectives to puzzles, children to monsters. No one is free and Denis crafts a drama that is as layered as the prisons depicted within it. Turning mundane and recently wet suburban streets into diabolical mazes of pain and anguish. The pacing of the film lets the atmosphere of the setting penetrate into our bones, the cold wetness clings to us. We can feel how this place feels, what it’s like to be there, and soon, what it’s like to be driven to things you’d never imagine you’d be capable of.

There is a brutal functionality to the elements of violence in the film. A touchstone of Denis’ work since this film was released. The large black boxes littering a house, a hammer, a shower. These things become terrible implements. When used in the right or wrong way. The banality of the tools only serves to make their use even more poignant, because we’ve all wielded a hammer at some point in our lives. We know how it feels and how much it would hurt someone if we decided to swing it in their direction.

The scrawled mazes, the dead ends, the detective’s old tattoos - the symbols of investigation and deciphering are always present. From the very first shot, which Denis and Roger Deakins agonised over to the chagrin of the First AD, the idea of seeing things as they are is clear. The visual language of bars, of not seeing the wood for the trees is there from the start. And, as soon as the film begins, we are a prisoner to it.

TL;DR: Prisoners is one of those films that can be endlessly rewatched, the depth, the details, the satisfaction.

*Available for a small rental fee on Apple, Amazon, Google and YouTube in the US, and the UK.

Fact: The film earned cinematographer Roger Deakins his 12th Oscar nomination. He would finally win on his 15th go for Blade Runner 2049, also directed by Denis.

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FILM TWO: A PRAYER BEFORE DAWN

2017 Dir Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
1hr 56 mins

This film contains a very real prison in more ways than one. The film, though set in a prison, was also shot in a real prison in Thailand. When you watch, you can see that the texture and feel of the place would be almost impossible to replicate - all those years of pain and patina etched on the walls. It tells a story onto itself. The film is as simple and bold as a bunch of knuckles to the face. Billy, an addict and drug dealer, is sent to prison in Thailand - he suffers at the hands of other inmates, the structure itself, and his own demons. He focuses on the only thing that can help him, fighting.

He has to fight his way out, as the poster tells us. He finds meaning in the training and discipline - he sees a light no matter how faint. It’s quite a tender and brutal film, Billy is a naive innocent in ways, someone out of their depth. But through these experiences, he grows, he becomes someone that maybe he could never have been on the outside. The prison makes him.

TL;DR: A severe and brutal tale of a Westerner in a foreign land’s harshest prison and how he found a way through.

*Available for a small rental fee on Apple, Amazon, Google and YouTube in the US and Apple, Google and YouTube the UK.

Fact: The majority of the people playing prisoners were at one time real inmates themselves.