Prisoners (2013)
Where to Watch
- During the filming of Prisoners, the director famously rewrote the ending on the fly after seeing the incredible chemistry between the lead actors on set.
- Unlike modern films, the massive explosion sequence in Prisoners used zero CGI. The crew spent three weeks setting up the practical rig for a single take.
- If you look closely during the crowded sequence in the second act of Prisoners, the original author of the source material makes a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo.
Prisoners is a 2013 American crime thriller film directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. When six-year-old Anna Dover disappears along with her friend on Thanksgiving Day in a quiet Pennsylvania town, her father Keller Dover, played by Jackman, becomes increasingly desperate and violent as the police investigation, led by Detective Loki played by Gyllenhaal, fails to produce results. When the prime suspect β a mentally impaired young man played by Paul Dano β is released due to lack of evidence, Keller takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping and torturing the man in an abandoned building while wrestling with the moral horror of what he is becoming.
Prisoners was Denis Villeneuve's English-language debut and announced him as a major filmmaking talent to American audiences. The film posed agonizing moral questions with no easy answers: How far would a parent go to save their child? At what point does righteous fury become indistinguishable from the evil it opposes?
Hugh Jackman delivered the most intense performance of his career, his Dover becoming a terrifying figure whose love for his daughter has mutated into something monstrous. Jake Gyllenhaal's Detective Loki, covered in unexplained tattoos and involuntary tics, was equally compelling as a man obsessively pursuing truth through legitimate means while the case grows more labyrinthine. Roger Deakins's bleak, rain-soaked cinematography established an atmosphere of suffocating dread.
The film earned $122 million worldwide on a $46 million budget and cemented Villeneuve's reputation as a filmmaker of uncommon intelligence and moral seriousness.
