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Kidnapping thrillers often lull us into a sense of safety in the opening sequences, showing the normal rhythms of life that will soon be shattered. Denis Villeneuve's "Prisoners" does not go that route. It opens with a shot of a snowy forest, where a deer quietly noses around for food. Into the frame comes the barrel of a shotgun. We hear a prayer being intoned. Boom, the deer goes down. The camera pulls back to show a father ( Hugh Jackman ) and teenage son (Dylan Minnette), in day-glo hunting gear staring at their kill through the ranks of bare trees. On the drive home, the father, who seems humorless, intense, and a bit of a bore, lectures the son on how to always be prepared for the worst in life. 

This opening is so heavy-handed that it's amazing that the film doesn't instantly collapse under its symbolic weight. Shot by the great Roger Deakins , regular cinematographer for the Coen brothers, the movie is drenched in rain and drained of color. Aspects of "Prisoners" are effective, but for the most part it's rather ridiculous (despite the fact that it clearly wants to be taken super-seriously), and there's an overwrought quality to much of the acting.

Keller Dover (Jackman) is an independent contractor who lives with his wife Grace ( Maria Bello ) and two kids in a suburban neighborhood. He loves Bruce Springsteen , "The Star-Spangled Banner," hunting, and hoarding canned goods, gas masks, and survivalist gadgets in his basement. On Thanksgiving, the Dovers go to dinner with a neighboring family, Franklin and Nancy Birch ( Terrence Howard and Viola Davis ), who have two kids the same age. While the parents drink wine and talk in the living room, the two little girls ask if they can take a walk. It is a walk from which they do not return. Panic ensues, especially when it becomes clear that a creepy RV, which had been seen parked in the neighborhood earlier, has vanished. Detective Loki ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) is assigned to the case.

The RV's owner, Alex Jones ( Paul Dano ), is dragged in for questioning. Forensics say the RV is clean of physical evidence, but Alex is strange. he speaks in a whispery high voice that makes him sound like a pre-teen. It is not inconceivable to think that he may be hiding something. This is clearly Dover's take, and he and Loki immediately start to butt heads about the course of the investigation. When Jones is released due to lack of evidence (into the custody of his aunt, played by Melissa Leo ), Dover takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping Jones, and holding him hostage in an abandoned dilapidated building. Dover loops in Franklin Birch on his plan to beat the truth out of Jones. Birch is horrified at the sight of Jones tied to a sink, but he ignores his own moral compass in the face of Dover's furious certainty. This is one of the subtler points of the script: how certainty can override doubt with sheer force, and how doubt is often essential to maintaining our humanity.  

Hugh Jackman huffs and puffs and screams and roars throughout the film, and it becomes monotonous, but what all that behavior tells us is that this is a weak man who needs to feel powerful. In one telling moment, while murmuring the "Our Father," he is unable to say "as we forgive those who trespass against us." He has a veritable arsenal in his basement, his family could withstand a mustard gas attack as well as the Zombie Apocalypse, but he couldn't protect his daughter on a simple walk through a safe neighborhood. And he's so convinced that Alex Jones is the guy that he is blind to other possibilities. Meanwhile, his wife lies in bed, tranquilizing herself into a stupor.

Gyllenhaal is great here in a role that must have looked rather uninteresting on the page. Aaron Guzikowski's script, so packed with religious symbols that verges on a sermon, is excellent in its spare and compelling portrait of Loki. The only image of the character outside the context of his job is his introductory scene, eating Thanksgiving dinner in an empty, fluorescent-lit Chinese restaurant as the rain batters down outside. The only thing we learn about his past is that he was in a boys' home and was raised in foster care. His knuckles and neck are sprinkled with tattoos, including a cross on one thumb. He's got a facial tic. We meet a lot of creeps in "Prisoners", and you get the sense that Detective Loki could have been one of them if he hadn't become a cop. It's a nice performance from Gyllenhaal, and its subtlety is welcome considering all the teeth gnashing going on in other performances.

Director Villeneuve gives us a couple of truly suspenseful scenes. One is a chase through the nighttime back yards of the neighborhood after a candlelight vigil for the two girls. The interiors of the houses seem gloomy and cramped, with walls cutting into the frame and characters coming in and out of sight: a visual correlative for the idea of people cut off from one another. But as the plot goes into high gear and we get other suspects, basement lairs and a glimpse of vast conspiracies, "Prisoners" wears out its welcome.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Prisoners (2013)

146 minutes

Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki

Hugh Jackman as Keller Dover

Paul Dano as Alex Jones

Maria Bello as Grace Dover

Melissa Leo as Holly Jones

Viola Davis as Nancy Birch

Terrence Howard as Franklin Birch

• Denis Villeneuve
• Aaron Guzikowski

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Film Review: ‘Prisoners’

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

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The wages of sin, guilt, vengeance and redemption weigh heavy on the characters of “ Prisoners ,” a spellbinding, sensationally effective thriller with a complex moral center that marks a grand-slam English-lingo debut for the gifted Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve . Powered by an unusually rich, twisty script by Aaron Guzikowski (“ Contraband ”) and career-best performances from Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal , this tale of two Pennsylvania families searching for their kidnapped daughters sustains an almost unbearable tension for two-and-a-half hours of screen time, satisfying as both a high-end genre exercise and a searing adult drama of the sort Hollywood almost never makes anymore. Fully deserving of mention in the same breath as “Seven,” “Mystic River” and “In the Bedroom,” this Sept. 20 Warners release may prove too intense for some viewers, but should ride strong reviews and word of mouth to above-average R-rated returns. It immediately enters the ring as an awards-season heavyweight.

Though at first glance the pic would appear to have little in common with his previous work, Villeneuve has long shown an interest in the psychological and emotional consequences of violence, as evidenced by 2009’s serenely chilling, black-and-white “ Polytechnique ” (about a real-life Canadian mass shooting) and especially 2010’s Oscar-nominated “ Incendies ,” which “Prisoners” echoes in its fragmented central mystery and its theme of the good and ill transmitted from parents to children. But in every respect, the new film finds Villeneuve working on his biggest and most ambitious canvas to date and, perhaps most impressive, flawlessly catching the moods and mores of small-town, God-fearing America.

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The movie announces its measured, quietly confident tone right from the opening scene of a father-son deer-hunting trip, the first of many images of predators pursuing their prey. “Be ready,” says the father, Pennsylvania carpenter Keller Dover (Jackman), to the teenage boy ( Dylan Minnette ), a crucifix dangling from the rear-view mirror, a late autumn chill hanging in the air. Back at home, where Keller’s wife, Grace ( Maria Bello ), and 6-year-old daughter, Anna (Erin Gerasimovich), safely await his return, the basement is stocked with enough emergency provisions for a nuclear holocaust. (Among other thing, “Prisoners” is very much a movie about what people have in their basements.) All the canned goods in the world, however, cannot shield the Dovers from what is about to happen next.

Theirs is the kind of quaint suburban street where people walk over to the neighbor’s house for Thanksgiving dinner and feel relatively insulated from the world’s violent ills. Yet it is during just such a Thanksgiving that Anna wanders off unsupervised along with 7-year-old Joy, the daughter of family friends Nancy and Franklin Birch ( Viola Davis and Terrence Howard , respectively). By dessert, both have vanished without a trace . The only clue: Earlier in the day, the girls were seen playing around a camper van parked in front of a vacant house down the road, the faint sound of a radio suggesting that someone was inside, patiently watching.

Det. Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is spending his Thanksgiving alone, flirting with the waitress in a lonely Chinese diner, when he first responds to the case. In the best film-noir manner, rain is sheeting down, and the camera of the great d.p. Roger Deakins (who has shot the film in wintry blues and blacks with an expressionist edge) pushes in slowly from behind. Loki, we are told, has never failed to solve a case, though this is at odds with the man’s solemn demeanor, his haunted gaze and the elaborate tattoos jutting out from his collar suggesting reserves of private rage. Compare this to the eager-beaver murder sleuth Gyllenhaal played in David Fincher’s “Zodiac” and the full breadth of his impressive range immediately comes into focus.

The camper van is soon located along with its owner, a gangly, inarticulate man-child named Alex (played to creepy perfection by Paul Dano ), who lives with his aunt (Melissa Leo) in the kind of run-down, cluttered tract house where serial killers and other movie deviants tend to reside. But awareness of such familiar tropes — and awareness of our awareness of them — is one of “Prisoners’” canny strengths. So it turns out that Alex is not the kidnapper — or at least, that there’s no physical evidence tying him to the scene — and the police are forced to let him go. Which is when Keller, who’s as sure as we are that Alex is guilty, takes matters into his own hands, abducting the suspect and chaining him up in an abandoned apartment building that belonged to his father. The movie’s tally of kidnappers now stands at two.

And the puzzle of “Prisoners” has only just begun to assemble. Following a lead to the home of an elderly priest (Len Cariou), Loki discovers a rotting corpse in a hidden cellar. Then, at exactly the one-hour mark, another shifty young man appears on the scene, triggering a whole new set of suspicions. All the while, Alex sits in hock, violently tortured and interrogated by Keller (who tells his wife he’s off helping the police) in an effort to discern the girls’ whereabouts.

With each successive revelation, Guzikowski’s brilliant script satisfies the necessary machinations while always flowing effortlessly from his vivid, multi-dimensional characters. That delicate balance extends to Villeneuve’s direction, which maintains a vise-like grip on the viewer without ever resorting to cheap shock effects or compromising the integrity of the human drama. Yet this is also a film that breathes, that knows it has the audience in its palm and can take time out for the kind of incidental, character-deepening scenes that usually end up on the cutting-room floor. In less assured hands, a movie called “Prisoners” with a plot like this would be an invitation to disaster, heavy on self-conscious allegory, symbolism and moral debate. (Everyone, don’t you see, is a prisoner of something — of time, of grief, of his own psyche.) In Villeneuve’s, nothing is belabored, the thorny questions of right and wrong bubbling under the surface without ever being declaimed.

Jackman has simply never been better than as this true believer forced to question his beliefs. Effortlessly, the Australian actor projects a solid, rugged Americanness, the acme of a man whose home is his castle and who sees himself as his family’s protector. It is a performance void of vanity or the desire to be loved by the audience, and moment to moment it is exhilarating to watch. In just a handful of scenes each, Bello and Davis suggest the full, inexpressible weight of motherly grief. Leo, given a role rife with opportunities to ham it up, instead plays things with the sober conviction of a disappointed life, another standout in a movie with nary a squandered performance in the mix.

In addition to Deakins’ stellar work, longtime Clint Eastwood editors Joel Cox and Gary Roach have done a formidable job of assembling the pic’s densely constructed narrative web. Score by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson (also making his big-studio debut) strikes just the right haunting, mournful notes.

Reviewed at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Calif., Aug. 27, 2013. (In Telluride Film Festival; Toronto Film Festival — Special Presentations.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 153 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. release of an Alcon Entertainment presentation of an 8:38 Prods./Madhouse Entertainment production. Produced by Broderick Johnson, Kira Davis, Andrew A. Kosove, Adam Kolbrenner. Co-producer, Steven P. Wegner. Executive producers, Edward L. McDonnell, John H. Starke, Robyn Meisinger, Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson.
• Crew: Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Screenplay, Aaron Guzikowski. Camera (Deluxe color, 35mm), Roger Deakins; editors, Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach; music, Johann Johannsson; music supervisor, Deva Anderson; production designer, Patrice Vermette; art director, Paul Kelly; set decorator, Frank Galline; set designers, Mayumi Konishi-Valentine, Aaron Linker; costume designer, Renee April; sound (Datasat/Dolby Digital/SDDS), Mary H. Ellis; sound designer, Tom Ozanich; supervising sound editor, Alan Robert Murray; re-recording mixers, John Reitz, Greg Rudloff; visual effects, Pacific Title & Art Studio, Luma Pictures; stunt coordinator, Steven Ritzi; assistant director, Donald L. Sparks; casting, Kerry Barden, Paul Schnee
• With: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo, Paul Dano, Dylan Minnette, Zoe Soul, Erin Gerasimovich, Kyla-Drew Simmons, Wayne Duvall, Len Cariou, David Dastmalchian.

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Prisoners – review

Atmospheric cinematography by Roger Deakins lends an affecting air of doomy portent to this twisty thriller about child abduction and the corruption of innocence. Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard are the fathers of two missing girls who take the law into their own hands after Paul Dano's prime suspect is released without charge. Contraband writer Aaron Guzikowski's script toys with Nietzschean ideas about the inherent dangers of fighting monsters; at every turn, violence begets violence, with the sleep of reason producing nothing but nightmares.

As the detective charged with cracking the case, Jake Gyllenhaal plays obsessive with his eyelids, blinking like someone permanently awakening from a stunned stupor. Viola Davis and Maria Bello are convincingly wretched as the mothers who react to heartbreak in very different ways, while Melissa Leo lends gravity even as the narrative floats towards the lightweight. There are holes in the plot big enough to drive an RV through, and the labyrinthine final act stretches credibility beyond breaking point. But it's a tense and engaging thriller with some big ideas, only some of which it is able to carry.

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• Hugh Jackman
• Jake Gyllenhaal
• Melissa Leo
• Viola Davis
• Crime films
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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

When Keller Dover's daughter and her friend go missing, he takes matters into his own hands as the police pursue multiple leads and the pressure mounts. When Keller Dover's daughter and her friend go missing, he takes matters into his own hands as the police pursue multiple leads and the pressure mounts. When Keller Dover's daughter and her friend go missing, he takes matters into his own hands as the police pursue multiple leads and the pressure mounts.

• Denis Villeneuve
• Aaron Guzikowski
• Hugh Jackman
• Jake Gyllenhaal
• Viola Davis
• 1.3K User reviews
• 506 Critic reviews
• 70 Metascore
• 10 wins & 38 nominations total

• Keller Dover

• Detective Loki

• Nancy Birch

• Holly Jones

• Grace Dover

• Franklin Birch

• Ralph Dover

• Eliza Birch

• (as Kyla-Drew Simmons)

• Captain Richard O'Malley

• Father Patrick Dunn

• Officer Carter

• Officer Wedge

• Forensics Guy
• (as Robert Treveiler)

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Did you know

• Trivia Detective Loki's tattoos, Freemason ring, and facial tics were all Jake Gyllenhaal 's ideas.
• Goofs Loki finds a victim he believes has been injected with a drug. He looks at the vial briefly before throwing it on the ground and taking the victim away for treatment. Nobody with his training would have thrown the vial away; the label would identify the drug and strength, and give a clue as to the amount used, all helpful for successful treatment.

Keller Dover : Pray for the best, but prepare for the worst.

• Connections Featured in The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: Episode #21.212 (2013)
• Soundtracks Put Your Hand In The Hand Written by Gene MacLellan Performed by Ocean Courtesy of Buddah Records By arrangement with Sony Licensing

User reviews 1.3K

• will-vanduzer
• Sep 6, 2013
• What is the song playing in the van?
• September 20, 2013 (United States)
• United States
• Official site
• Official site (Japan)
• Lần Theo Dấu Vết
• Conyers, Georgia, USA (Conyers, Milstead, Rockdale County)
• Alcon Entertainment
• 8:38 Productions
• Madhouse Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $46,000,000 (estimated)
• $61,002,302
• $20,817,053
• Sep 22, 2013
• $122,127,446

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 33 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Atmos

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PRISONERS Review

Prisoners movie review. Matt reviews Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Maria Bello, and Paul Dano.

[ This is a re-post of my review from the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.  Prisoners opens tomorrow. ]

There’s enough symbolism and religious themes to give Prisoners some weight. There’s enough curiosity to keep its mystery intriguing. Director Denis Villeneuve does slightly more than expected to keep us interested in its segregated storyline where one hand provides the mystery and the other hand provides some semblance. In between is a film that’s far longer than it needs to be but is supported by Roger Deakins ’ striking cinematography and a great cast with a standout performance from Hugh Jackman .

Keller (Jackman) and Grace ( Maria Bello ) Dover are having Thanksgiving dinner at the house of their friends Franklin ( Terrence Howard ) and Nancy ( Viola Davis ) Birch. At one point in the evening, their daughters Anna ( Erin Gerasimovich ) and Joy ( Kyla Drew Simmons ), respectively, go outside to play. When the girls don’t return, a frantic hunt to find them begins. Detective Loki ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) leads an investigation to locate the missing girls and their kidnapper, but with each passing day, the search grows more desperate and so does Keller. In his desperation, he kidnaps and tortures potential suspect Alex Jones ( Paul Dano ) in the hopes of finding Anna. Meanwhile, Loki tries to piece together clues to find the true perpetrator.

Villeneuve works two sides that only cross in a functional manner. Loki is working the nuts and bolts of the investigation, and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski ’s leaves just enough breadcrumbs to keep us pecking along. It’s not a mind-blowing mystery, but it provides a serviceable whodunit to keep us moving along. Since Loki’s emotional investment is kept at a professional distance (he cares but the case isn’t consuming him, and he doesn’t have a personal life to disrupt), it’s up to the Dovers and Birches to remind us of the emotional cost.

Eventually, Grace, Franklin, and Nancy fall into the background, and Keller is driving forward a mad quest to find his daughter. Jackman provides an intense performance showcasing a rage we haven’t seen from the actor before. We’re all familiar with the Wolverine berserker, but Keller’s desperation to find Anna brings forth a fury that is even more terrifying than a character who uses metal claws to impale people. Furthemore, Keller’s actions remind us that there’s a religious undertone to the movie and that when his faith in God is tested, failing the test can lead to horrible consequences.

Nevertheless, the theme, plot, and even Jackman’s performance aren’t enough to sustain a two-and-a-half hour thriller. That’s when Roger Deakins carries the picture. Deakins is one of the best cinematographers of all time. His work is more than eye-candy—it’s effective. It’s not about the prettiest composition (although his compositions are fantastic) but finding a visual approach that draws us in whereas another director of photography may have gone for the path of least resistance or perhaps something pretty but vapid. Early in the film when Loki spots a suspicious RV during a rainstorm, Deakins paints a vivid picture as silhouettes wield flashlights that cut through a dark and stormy night. The shot conveys the dread and obfuscation that will come to define the story.

Prisoners needs the boost Deakins provides. It’s a thriller that doesn’t feel bloated as much as it overly indulges the plot of a slightly above-average mystery. It loads up on the technical aspects, a talented cast, and checks off boxes to gussy up its genre trappings. There’s nothing wrong with trying to excel at the expected rather than transcend it, but Villeneuve’s embellishments are mostly superficial. They make for a moderately compelling mystery, a moderately thoughtful drama, and a moderately successful effort.

Prisoners Review

A beautiful slog..

Prisoners looks and feels like the best of contemporary thrillers, but when it comes to cracking its story, it doesn't have a clue.

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Movie Review

After Two Children Vanish, Agony Begets Recklessness

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By A.O. Scott

• Sept. 19, 2013

Violence against children strikes most people as a uniquely terrible phenomenon, which may be why filmmakers are so fond of it. Nothing sparks a revenge plot, or allows a director to trade intellectual nuance for visceral feeling, quite as efficiently as a child in peril. When dealing with people who gratuitously cause the innocent to suffer, no retribution seems too extreme, and the history of movies is full of good men (and a few women) driven to righteous brutality against predators, kidnappers and abusers.

Keller Dover, the enraged, grief-addled father played by Hugh Jackman in Denis Villeneuve’s “ Prisoners ,” seems like such a character. “He’s not a person,” Keller says of the man he believes is responsible for the abduction of his young daughter and her friend. And this conviction, that the apparent perpetrator has forfeited his humanity, allows an honorable family man to contemplate torture and murder. He beats his captive bloody and locks him in a makeshift cell in an abandoned building, hoping to extract the truth and perhaps also a measure of rough justice. When the other girl’s parents (Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) express doubts about what Keller is doing, their qualms strike him as evidence of weakness and irrationality.

But if “Prisoners,” written by Aaron Guzikowski, upholds some of the conventions of the angry-dad revenge drama, it also subverts them in surprising, at times devastating ways. The easy catharsis of righteous payback is complicated at every turn, and pain and uncertainty spread like spilled oil on an asphalt road.

When the girls, Anna and Joy, go missing late on Thanksgiving afternoon, suspicion focuses on the driver of a camper that had been parked in their small-town Pennsylvania neighborhood. An arrest is made of a young man (Paul Dano) who seems mentally disabled and shares no information about the girls’ whereabouts. Then a dead body is found in an elderly priest’s basement, and a second young man, with a nervous manner and a haunted look, shows up at a vigil for the missing children and runs away into the night. False leads and shadowy connections proliferate, and nobody knows if Anna and Joy are dead or alive.

It’s all very creepy and mysterious, and “Prisoners” is, among other things, a satisfying whodunit, with artfully deposited clues and twists that are surprising without entirely undermining the film’s naturalistic credibility.

But Mr. Villeneuve, a French Canadian director whose previous movies include “Incendies” and “Polytechnique,” is more invested in mood and meaning than in plot. A connoisseur of grim tales — “Incendies” is about the endless trauma of a Middle Eastern civil war; “Polytechnique” is based on the true story of a shooting rampage at a Montreal university — he has an intense, almost philosophical interest in the nature of evil.

Like “Zodiac,” “Mystic River” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Prisoners” suggests that evil is not confined to a single person or set of actions. Crimes are specified, and criminals are discovered, but empirical solutions are not enough to dispel the feeling that an uncontained atmospheric menace broods over this wintry landscape. (Roger A. Deakins’s somber cinematography turns the Keystone State into a study of grays and browns, dead leaves and bare trees, under a sky like wet metal.)

Keller, a survivalist with a basement full of canned goods and batteries, seems to have been infected by it even before the disappearance of his daughter. His wife (Maria Bello) tips into a pool of despair. Other people, like the aunt of one of the suspects (Melissa Leo), are weighed down by bad luck and weary dread.

But the most tormented character may be Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose connection to the kidnapping is professional rather than personal. Like Keller, Loki is a familiar figure in a movie like this, and the contrast between them — the hotheaded, impulsive avenger and the cool, careful sleuth — is something we’ve seen before. Mr. Jackman is solid and persuasive, but it is Mr. Gyllenhaal, with his downturned mouth and twitchy eyes, who anchors the film. We know nothing of Loki’s off-duty life, if he even has one, but he is the sensitive, skeptical filter through which we try to imagine the fate that could have befallen two happy children playing on a November afternoon.

Nearly all of “Prisoners” takes place within a single week, but Mr. Villeneuve wisely — if also somewhat cruelly — refuses to speed up, or to spike the action with jolts of adrenaline. He captures, with impressive discipline, just how slowly time can move during a crisis, how the static condition of not knowing can press down on every moment. Panic can be paralyzing, as it is for Keller’s wife and Joy’s parents, but acting rashly, as Keller is inclined to, can have catastrophic effects.

“Prisoners” is the kind of movie that can quiet a room full of casual thrill-seekers. It absorbs and controls your attention with such assurance that you hold your breath for fear of distracting the people on screen, exhaling in relief or amazement at each new revelation. By the end, you may be a little worn out, and perhaps also slightly let down by the fussily clever revelations that wrap up the story, but in the meantime, you are a willing captive, unable to tell the difference between dread and delight.

“Prisoners” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Graphic violence and profanity.

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Engrossing revenge thriller is very violent and intense.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Sometimes otherwise moral people make murky (and e

All of the parents in the movie are flawed and con

Many scenes of bloody torture and imprisonment, in

Two married couples are affectionate, but they usu

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t,"

A few vehicle brands -- Ford Crown Victoria, Trans

Adults drink, sometimes to excess. A priest is so

Parents need to know that Prisoners is a brutally intense crime thriller/revenge film starring Hugh Jackman. Characters make unthinkable choices to find their missing kids, and there's frequent bloody violence. In addition to the central kidnapping of two little girls, people are shot and killed (or kill…

Positive Messages

Sometimes otherwise moral people make murky (and even illegal) choices in order to take justice into their own hands -- particularly when their loved ones' lives are at stake. Keller tells his son that the only thing standing between a man and a sudden threat is his ability to protect himself and those he loves.

Positive Role Models

All of the parents in the movie are flawed and confused. They're desperate for their girls and in some cases feel compelled to do unthinkable things to get closer to information on their whereabouts.

Violence & Scariness

Many scenes of bloody torture and imprisonment, including close-ups of a chained and brutally beat-up man's face, a young man who shoots himself in the head, a man forced to drink a sedative, a girl who's about to be poisoned to death, the screams and cries of victims, and police killing a criminal. A father yells angrily and curses at his son. People are shot, bludgeoned, tortured with scalding or freezing water, and imprisoned. Young girls are missing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two married couples are affectionate, but they usually embrace out of grief rather than passion. A very brief glimpse of a teen girl in a tub (just her head and shoulders).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "bitch," "damn it," "hell," "goddamn," "oh my God," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A few vehicle brands -- Ford Crown Victoria, Trans-Am.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink, sometimes to excess. A priest is so drunk on whiskey that he's basically passed out on the floor, and a man who says he hasn't had a drink in nine years then starts to drink regularly. An upset mother takes sleeping pills and other prescription opiates. A kidnapper forces prisoners to consume a drug-laced drink.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Prisoners is a brutally intense crime thriller/revenge film starring Hugh Jackman . Characters make unthinkable choices to find their missing kids, and there's frequent bloody violence. In addition to the central kidnapping of two little girls, people are shot and killed (or kill themselves), beaten to an unrecognizable pulp, and tortured in various ways. One man shoots himself in the head, and a police officer must shoot a suspect. There's frequent strong language ("f--k," "s--t," "a--hole"), as well as excessive alcohol use by adults and some use of pills and other drugs. The movie's disturbing themes and unflinching violence make it best suited for adults and possibly some very mature teens. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (21)
• Kids say (49)

Based on 21 parent reviews

Disturbing, Gripping Thriller has Violence

What's the story.

PRISONERS follows Pennsylvanian carpenter Keller Dover ( Hugh Jackman ), who strongly believes in hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. And that's just what happens on Thanksgiving, while Keller and his wife, Grace ( Maria Bello ), celebrate the holiday with their neighbors, Franklin and Nancy Birch ( Terrence Howard , Viola Davis ). After dinner, Keller's daughter, Anna (Erin Gerasimovich), and Franklin's little girl, Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons), walk back to the Dovers' house alone, even though they were told to ask their teen siblings to accompany them. Unable to find the girls, Keller's son, Ralph (Dylan Minnette), mentions a suspicious, idling RV the kids encountered earlier in the day. Once the cops are involved, Detective Loki ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) finds the RV and its driver, Alex Jones ( Paul Dano ), a mentally disabled adult with no criminal record. Alex is released, but Keller is convinced that the young man knows more than he's letting on. Keller manages to kidnap and imprison Alex and then convinces a horrified Franklin that if they don't torture Alex for information, they'll never find their girls.

Is It Any Good?

Prisoners is a thinking audience's revenge film -- that is, if moviegoers (particularly parents) can stomach the subject matter. It's long, disturbing, and nerve-wracking to watch, but the performances, the imagery, and the fabulous cinematography (courtesy of 10-time Oscar nominee Roger Deakins) make it worth sitting through all of the angst, violence, and horror. Jackman is unforgettable as Keller, a God-fearing carpenter who can do so much with his hands -- including beating an unarmed, mentally disabled younger man until he's no longer recognizable. These are the things he believes a father must do when the police fail to see what his gut is telling him is true.

In contrast to Jackman's Keller is Howard's Franklin, a father who doesn't love his daughter any less but doesn't want to bloody his hands (though he's willing to stand by and watch). This thriller has lots of twists and turns for suspense fans, but its true artistry is in the sometimes-sickening character development, which reveals the depths to which people will go when their children's safety is on the line, when their faith is in tatters, and when all hope is nearly lost. The two-and-a-half-hour runtime isn't quite merited, but French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has woven a gripping, if terrifying, tale that explores the heart and actions of a well-intentioned but extreme vigilante.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the popularity of revenge movies, particularly ones in which fathers take justice into their own hands to save their kids. Why do these movies speak to audiences? Do the ends ever justify the means?

What is Prisoners saying about morality and justice? How is Keller's vigilantism depicted? Is he intended to be a sympathetic character?

The two fathers are portrayed as foils: One is willing to do something illegal/immoral for the sake of finding his daughter, while the other doesn't want to cross any lines. Which one did you find more believable? Does the film "judge" either man?

Discuss the role of gender in the story. Which characters acted like stereotypical men or women? Which characters twisted the traditional associations with a particular gender?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 20, 2013
• On DVD or streaming : December 17, 2013
• Cast : Hugh Jackman , Jake Gyllenhaal , Terrence Howard
• Director : Denis Villeneuve
• Inclusion Information : Black actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 146 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout
• Last updated : March 30, 2024

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Movie Reviews

'prisoners' of a story, bound by that devil subtext.

Ian Buckwalter

An underemployed contractor (Hugh Jackman) takes the law --€” and a few things outside it --€” into his own hands with regard to the man (Paul Dano) he suspects has kidnapped his daughter. Wilson Webb/Warner Bros. hide caption

An underemployed contractor (Hugh Jackman) takes the law --€” and a few things outside it --€” into his own hands with regard to the man (Paul Dano) he suspects has kidnapped his daughter.

• Director: Denis Villeneuve
• Genre: Mystery, thriller
• Running Time: 153 minutes

Rated R for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout

With: Hugh Jackman , Jake Gyllenhaal , Viola Davis

If anyone thought Denis Villeneuve's attacks on his favorite targets might be tempered by his move from the art house to Hollywood-thriller territory, Prisoners should shut that line of thinking down in a hurry.

Though the setting is new — working-class Pennsylvania rather than Quebec and the Middle East — the issues at play in Villeneuve's Prisoners closely mirror those in the Canadian director's Oscar-nominated 2010 film, Incendies: the dangers of fundamentalism, the pliable morality of religion when it comes to violence and vengeance, and mankind's shocking capability for cruelty in the service of imagined righteousness.

The vehicle for the director's investigations is similar, too: a tense, many-layered, plot-heavy mystery that he uses to apply a vise grip to the viewer's attention while he hammers away at those themes. In Prisoners , it's the Thanksgiving abduction of two little girls, and the subsequent investigations into their whereabouts.

There's the official inquiry, led by the intense and idiosyncratic Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). Then there's the unofficial one — a vigilante campaign waged furiously by Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and reluctantly by Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard), the girls' fathers.

NPR's Bob Mondello reviewed The Prisoner for Thursday's All Things Considered.

When The Obvious Answer May Not Be The Right One

'prisoners' filled with twists and turns and moral ambiguity.

Villeneuve is undeniably a master of slow-build tension. His patient deliberation is such that each time he pushes his camera in, he might as well be turning the crank on a jack-in-the-box, slowly, so slowly that the wait for the next note in the song seems like a breathless eternity. I spent the first hour and 45 minutes of the film nervous, uneasy, fearing the impending doom in my chest.

But Villeneuve's film runs another 45 minutes beyond that, and that's where the strings attached to the director's initially expert manipulations begin to show.

The film's moral and political issues share nearly equal footing with the machinations of the plot for much of the early going. That sometimes risks turning the film's subtext a little too much into the text; long shots held on, say, the cross hanging from Keller's mirror or the gas mask in his basement punch up his Christianity and his survivalist impulses, respectively, in a way that ties them tightly — unfairly? — to the lengths he'll end up going to in his effort to save his daughter.

Viola Davis plays the mother of a second kidnap victim; Jake Gyllenhaal is the driven — and curiously idiosyncratic — detective on the case. Warner Bros. hide caption

Viola Davis plays the mother of a second kidnap victim; Jake Gyllenhaal is the driven — and curiously idiosyncratic — detective on the case.

Those lengths will eventually include some decidedly extralegal measures — vigilantism is too tidy a word for the tactics Keller employs — and it's no stretch to say that the abandoned small-town apartment building he uses as a kind of secret base of operations is an authorial stand-in for both Guantanamo and a CIA rendition site. But as unsubtle as both plotting and subtext are in this early part of the movie, it's as if they cancel each other out, the one distracting from the other just enough to make both work.

As we near the finish, though, the film grows less concerned with its moral conflicts and more with making the plot's too many puzzle pieces come together neatly. Now we notice plot conveniences like the fact that Loki is constantly showing up in dangerous situations without asking for backup.

It doesn't ruin the film, but it does undercut that stellar first two-thirds, as well as a pair of truly remarkable performances from Jackman and Gyllenhaal. The former, an actor of nearly impermeable likability, manages to invoke feelings of both sympathy and antipathy — genuine sorrow for his plight, combined with a sense of being morally filthy just for having watched his actions.

Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal's Loki is a rich collaboration between the actor, wardrobe and makeup to create a character with enough back story to fill a few movies of his own. So much so, in fact, that it's frustrating how little of that background comes to light to inform this movie. As it is, Loki's tattoos, his buttoned-up but tieless sartorial inclinations, his slicked-back hair, his tics — they're all idiosyncrasies masterfully rendered, but weirdly lacking context.

Loki is a skilled creation, but lacking that sense of why, it's hard not to think of him as an artistic construct rather than a character. The same goes for Prisoners, a work of impressive craftsmanship that winds up making us think too much about how it was fashioned rather than what it has to say.

Prisoners Review

27 Sep 2013

146 minutes

Having earned an Oscar nomination for his last film, Incendies, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve crosses the border for his English-language debut, Prisoners, a very American crime mystery. Villeneuve’s never been the cheeriest of filmmakers, so his portrait of US suburbia squats beneath dirty-white skies, draped in a thin snow that you know will never make for good angels.

The subject matter is inherently stark, concerning the mysterious disappearance of two girls. But this isn’t a straight investigation — when are they ever? — as the cops arrest the likely abductor just a few scenes later: a greasy-haired creep with a Michael Jackson voice and “the IQ of a ten-year-old” played by Paul Dano. So it can’t be him, right? Too obvious? The father of one of the girls, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), would disagree, and being a good, Christian, American survivalist, with gas masks and bags of lime in the basement, takes matters into his own hands. On his release due to lack of evidence, Dano’s Alex Jones is abducted and incarcerated in Dover’s DIY torture dungeon until he gives up the girls’ location. Meanwhile, the investigation continues by loner cop Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Prisoners is a smartly structured, solidly performed thriller, executing intertwining races against time — to save both the girls, and prove Alex’s innocence or guilt — within the same psychological labyrinth. And the political undercurrent is not hard to detect: Dover is the America that invaded Iraq, believing his grief-fuelled quest for justice places him beyond morality and the law.

Back on the surface, there are all the expected turns and twists, and anyone familiar with the genre will sniff out one particularly plump red herring. Also, it is a shame the film resorts to the cliché of a character spotting a vital clue after throwing all their files to the floor in frustration. But Villeneuve and writer Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband) keep you engaged while they keep you guessing, never allowing either the tension, or the grimness, to relent.

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clock This article was published more than  10 years ago

‘Prisoners’ movie review: A well-made, pulpy crime thriller

" Prisoners ," a crime thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, was one of the early popular hits at last week's Toronto International Film Festival , earning rave whispers in the word-of-mouth fog that inevitably engulfs the 11-day event.

As if that hype weren’t enough, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve sent a written message to this week’s preview screenings, thanking attendees for their “interest” in his film, which, in his humble words, sounded for all the world like a sincere little passion project he and his pals cobbled out of a shoestring and a dream.

In actuality, "Prisoners" is a big-studio genre picture, a familiar — and undeniably well-executed — example of pulp miserablism in the tradition of " Seven " and its grisly imitators. Given gravitas by Christian imagery and a mood of millennial survivalist desperation, this pulp procedural joins a long line of films that sell themselves by way of the very depravity and malignant moral imagination they pretend to deplore.

But if that’s your jam, hey, “Prisoners” is pretty good. Jackman plays Keller Dover, a Pennsylvania contractor who with his family has joined friends and neighbors the Birches (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and their kids for Thanksgiving dinner when young Anna Dover and Joy Birch go missing. A local detective named Loki (Gyllenhaal) takes the case, and when a suspect emerges, a battle of wills ensues as Dover — whose motto is “Be ready” and who keeps a gas mask, generators and canned goods in his basement — threatens to take matters into his own hands.

As Dover plays out his long-gestating, ultra-violent revenge fantasies — all the while reciting the Lord’s Prayer, a crucifix conspicuously dangling from his rearview mirror, sermons playing on the truck radio — he resembles generations of vigilante protagonists who engage in all manner of torture and abuse fired by unimpeachable rage. “He stopped being human when he took our daughters,” Dover tells Franklin, who stands for rationality and restraint but is played by Howard as a henpecked, passive onlooker as events take their inevitable, bloody course. The fact that Dover is never given a compelling ethical counterpoint — other than Loki’s lame “I hear yous” and his friend’s increasingly pained looks — is just one way that “Prisoners” betrays its true allegiance, pretending to engage viewers in reflective soul-searching but really giving them an excuse to indulge in vicarious sadistic violence with a righteous conscience.

The reason "Prisoners" has achieved such serious purchase among critics and cineastes has to do with Villeneuve's pedigree (he wrote and directed the highly regarded " Incendies ," which possessed its own lurid plot pivot ) and the fact that it's superbly made. Shot by master cinematographer Roger Deakins in moody shades of gray and white, "Prisoners" exudes despair and spiritual murkiness; Jackman and Gyllenhaal bring their A-game (and, in Gyllenhaal's case, an unexplained eye tic) to roles that would otherwise be generic, and Davis and Maria Bello are, as usual, flawless as wives and mothers waking up each day to the same but somehow brand new nightmare.

The emotions the actors bring to bear on “Prisoners” are genuinely wrenching, and there’s no denying that Villeneuve and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski know how to ratchet up suspense and, in one or two scenes, nerve-jangling spook-outs. In that regard, they’ve delivered a grade-A genre exercise — but it’s a genre predicated on specious reasoning and promiscuous, pseudo-sacrificial suffering. Try as it might to entertain serious notions of manhood, evil and original sin, “Prisoners” works most effectively as Hollywood hypocrisy at its most sleek, efficient and meretricious. It’s stylish, high-minded hokum.

R. At area theaters. Contains disturbing violent content, including torture, and language throughout. 153 minutes.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Drama , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

• September 20, 2013
• Hugh Jackman as Keller Dover; Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki; Viola Davis as Nancy Birch; Maria Bello as Grace Dover; Terrence Howard as Franklin Birch; Paul Dano as Alex Jones; Len Cariou as Father Patrick Dunn; Melissa Leo as Holly Jones

Home Release Date

• December 17, 2013
• Denis Villeneuve

Distributor

• Warner Bros.

Movie Review

Keller Dover is the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind living just down the street from. He’s a hard-working carpenter, a God-fearing fellow who loves his family, supports his wife, cares for his friends and neighbors, and teaches his kids the important things of life. He’s the kind of man who thinks ahead—a guy who stores up food and supplies in his basement just in case the unexpected happens. ‘Cause like his dad always said, you gotta be ready!

Keller wasn’t ready, however, for his daughter to go missing. Her disappearance blindsided the Dover family like a runaway truck. They were all over at a neighbor’s house enjoying Thanksgiving when out of the blue both his little Anna and the neighbor’s girl, Joy, were just … gone.

They called the police, of course. But the cops weren’t much help. And by the time the first day had gone by, things were beginning to look dire. The only lead the police could come up with was a greasy, damaged-looking teen who was driving aimlessly around in a dirty old RV. He was just some loser who seemed to have the mental capacity of a 10-year-old. So after a stiff round of questioning, all the cops could do was let the creepy kid go.

By then the investigation was crossing over into day three. And Keller Dover had crossed over from doting dad to frightened father. Things were getting darker for him by the minute. Those poor, sweet girls were out there somewhere, and each passing hour of inaction meant a smaller chance that they’d ever come back alive.

And it wasn’t like that kid with the RV was so innocent. “They didn’t cry until I left.” That’s what the guy said right to Keller’s face when the police let him go. Nobody else seemed to hear it, but Keller did. There’s more to be found there, Keller’s sure of it. But everybody around him is just sitting on their hands, saying there’s no stinking evidence. There’s nothing to be done!

Well, Keller knows what must be done. The cops may not have the stomach to pry the truth out of this loser, but Keller does. And he’s got the vacant building and all the tools to get the job done right. He’s never been a man prone to violence. But when it’s your kid on the line, a man has to be ready.

Positive Elements

This is a dark, dark pic with some very ugly moments. But it features a man who prays repeatedly, deeply loves his family and readily makes whatever personal sacrifices are necessary to rescue his young daughter.

It’s also quite clear that Detective Loki, the man assigned to the missing girls’ case, is a dedicated cop who invests himself totally in solving the crimes set before him. He desperately works to save the missing kids and puts his own life in danger to save a girl from a lethal injection.

The film also raises compelling questions about the devastating impact of immoral choices. We’re shown one person who is a picture of evil incarnate, another who struggles but is almost totally consumed by a form of that same slowly corrupting evil, and a third who blanches at his own foul actions and ultimately turns away from them.

Spiritual Elements

It’s made perfectly clear that there is a very real spiritual war going on around us, even though we may not see it obviously at work in our day-to-day lives. Keller prays and prays and prays. We hear him lifting up the Lord’s Prayer while he and his son are in the woods hunting. He asks for God’s forgiveness in the heat of his horrible misdeeds. And even when he’s in the midst of a situation that will likely result in his own death, he falls to his knees and prays for the seemingly impossible safety of his dear daughter.

On the other side of the battle, we’re told twice that the kidnapping and murder of children is the way a wicked person wages “a war against God.” It’s stated that that kind of evil can figuratively turn good people into demons. (And we see that happen.)

Keller wears a cross, and Det. Loki has one tattooed on his hand. A local priest stores large religious statues in his basement, and we see candles bearing the image of Jesus.

Sexual Content

Violent content.

It’s not giving anything away to report that Keller grabs the creepy kid Alex and tortures him for information about the missing girls. We see the man strike Alex repeatedly, slam him violently into walls and the floor, trap him in an enclosed shower device and scald him with a steaming spray, and threaten to break his bones with a hammer. We also see the swollen-eyed, dribbling-blood results of this dreadful pummeling. (It should be noted that this drawn-out torment is especially uncomfortable to watch because we’re not quite sure if Alex is a really a vicious villain or merely the mentally handicapped boy that he appears to be.)

A partially mummified corpse is found tied up in a basement. Several trunks are filled with bloodied children’s clothes and large snakes. A man is shot in the leg and forced to jump into a deep hole. A forehead wound makes Loki’s face bleed profusely. He slams a suspect face-first into a wall, breaking the perp’s nose. He also mashes the man’s head down on an interview table. He shoots another criminal, splattering her brains all over the wall. A man puts a pistol in his mouth and commits a very messy suicide.

Alex tries to elude the police and crashes his RV into a tree, driving a large limb through the front window of the vehicle. A boy yanks a small dog off the ground by its throat, choking and torturing the whimpering animal. A young teen shoots a deer. We see a pig’s head draining of blood in a kitchen sink.

Crude or Profane Language

Close to 50 f-words, a dozen s-words and two or three uses each of “h‑‑‑” and “a‑‑.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a handful of times; God’s is combined with “d‑‑n” twice.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Keller’s wife is so distraught that she’s kept drugged with prescription meds; she stumbles about with slurred speech. Keller responds by buying booze and swilling straight from the bottle. We see him eventually pass out from his excess.

The Dovers and Birches drink alcohol during their Thanksgiving festivities. The local police captain pours a tall drink in his office to celebrate the end of a case. Loki finds the priest drunk on the floor, empty bottles lining the table tops in the man’s home.

A young girl is injected with a powerful drug that almost kills her. We see the numbing effects of a lesser dose of the stuff on others.

Other Negative Elements

Keller attempts to bring his reluctant neighbor in on Alex’s torture by telling him that it must be done or their girls will likely die. “He’s not a person anymore,” he insists.

Innocents are in danger. Evil is afoot and running wild. An angry “hero” attempts to beat the truth out of his handiest target. That’s the kind of Hollywood vengeance-movie formula that we’ve seen play out so many times before.

In this case, though, things aren’t as cut and dried as we may be used to. Just like real life, a heinous baddie isn’t so simple to spot in this crowd. The take-action choices aren’t so clear or easy to emotionally defend.

In fact, Prisoners’ twisting and turning missing-child mystery leaves us with dizzying questions of right and wrong. It smudges the charcoal line between hero and villain. It challenges us to evaluate the choices we make. And it leaves us to consider how evil can surreptitiously slip into our world and corrupt even the best of men through impassioned fear and convulsing rage.

Getting to those walk-out-of-the-theater introspections, however, is a jarring and treacherous and very messy journey. The tale’s serial killer revelations are unsettling to say the least, the language coarsely foul, and the literal torture sessions, along with their aftermath visuals, are, well, torturous.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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"Harrowing Search for Two Missing Girls"

What You Need To Know:

(BB, CC, Pa, AB, LLL, VVV, AA, D, MM) Strong moral worldview with overt Christian references, including the Lord’s Prayer is recited two or three times, marred by plot development where Christian character loses his way in frantic search for missing daughter but then seems to regain his faith toward the end as he suffers the consequences of bad actions, and drunken, troubled isolated Catholic priest is registered as a sex offender and has been removed from his parish but has key evidence to solve the case and villain says they and their family gave up being devout after family tragedy, to become an enemy of God, but the villain is overcome at the end; at least 68 obscenities (including many “f” words), three strong profanities and seven light profanities, plus vomiting in one scene; some extreme, very strong and some strong violence with blood includes man shoots himself in mouth and head, torture and implied torture, father holds prisoner a suspect in young daughter’s disappearance/kidnapping and punches him hard across the face resulting in lots of abrasions and blood, woman lifts sack over prisoner’s head and viewers see his face is incredibly puffy from the beatings he’s been taking to get him to talk, man holds down prisoner’s hand on porcelain and viciously swings hammer near prisoner’s hand and head several times and causes the porcelain to break into pieces each time he swings, hammer ends up stuck in wall near prisoner’s head, man imprisons suspect in small shower boarded up and lets shower spray scalding water on prisoner to get him to talk, and audience hears man scream, detective slams suspect’s head against table and a scuffle ensues, boxes being opened are full of snakes and children’s clothes, man forced to drink tea with knock-out agent in it, villain injects girl with some kind of poison, and she’s rushed to hospital to save her life, girl foams at mouth from poison before she’s saved in nick of time, man holds dog up by its neck using leash, man crashes van into tree, detective grazed in head and has to drive car fast while blood streams into one eye, corpse found, etc.; no sex; no nudity; alcohol use and hints of past alcohol abuse; smoking; and, lying, disobeying police instructions, moral relativism, mother becomes distraught and bedridden when daughter disappears and is presumed kidnapped, hiding information from police, references to sex offenders as possible suspects but nothing salacious is specifically mentioned, implied, or depicted, and policeman breaks his oath to uphold the law and this results in tragedy.

More Detail:

PRISONERS is a riveting, morally complex thriller about a Christian father who goes unhinged and breaks moral and societal rules to find his missing daughter. PRISONERS has a strong moral worldview mixed with overt Christian references, including prayer, but the story and the violence are intense, there’s lots of mostly strong foul language, and other immoral behavior.

The movie stars Hugh Jackman as Keller Dover, a recovered alcoholic turned devoutly Catholic family man, a carpenter struggling for work. When his young daughter and her best friend disappear on Thanksgiving, he loses his bearings and begins a maniacal search for her. His search escalates into seriously questionable behavior when he himself kidnaps the lead suspect after police release him without charges. He holds Alex prisoner and proceeds to beat him up repeatedly to get him to talk.

Meanwhile, a dogged policeman named Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) leads the search for the girls and starts to notice that Keller is acting strangely while disappearing for long hours at a time. He doesn’t yet realize that Keller has taken Alex hostage.

The question becomes, who will find the missing girls first? The detective or the angry father?

PRISONERS is one of the most intense, harrowing movies to be released in a long time. Every performance is expertly rendered, with Jackman and Gyllenhaal turning in some of the best work of their already impressive careers. Director Denis Villeneuve ratchets the tension to high levels throughout the movie without allowing the story to become over the top and risk slipping into pulp fiction territory.

While the movie is riveting throughout, there are a couple of plot holes and inexplicable character motivations that prevent PRISONERS from being the full-bore classic it might have been. The movie also goes on too long and doesn’t give viewers any down time in between what seems like several different very intense endings.

PRISONERS forces viewers to consider what choices they would make in the same situation of having their child kidnapped, as well as whether they could maintain their own faith under those circumstances. [Spoilers Follow] It turns out that the villain says they lost their faith when their son died of cancer. So now, the villain says, they are waging a war against God by taking children away from other parents. In the end, however, the father seems to regain his Christian faith in God, though he also suffers some bad consequences for his actions in torturing the one suspect.

PRISONERS is not an easy movie to watch and will prove difficult for many to handle. Besides the intense storyline, it contains lots of strong foul language and some very strong, extreme violence. So, despite its positive references to Christian prayer and moral sentiments, extreme caution is advised.

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The chilling true story behind netflix’s ‘what jennifer did’—your questions answered.

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What Jennifer Did. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024

The murder documentary What Jennifer Did is currently the No. 1 film on Netflix in the U.S. The film recounts the horrific events that unfolded on November 8, 2010, during a home invasion orchestrated by an estranged daughter. While watching, learn more about the disturbing true crime case and find answers to your burning questions , like where Jennifer and her dad is now.

In January 2015, 28-year-old Jennifer Pan was sentenced to life in prison for hiring hit men to kill her parents. That’s the subject of Netflix’s new Jenny Popplewell-directed documentary, What Jennifer Did, which premiered on the streaming site on April 10, 2024. Using incriminating text messages and interviews with detectives from the case, the documentary details how Pan went from being a child pianist to a criminal convicted of first-degree murder.

What Happened In The Jennifer Pan Case?

On November 8, 2010, dispatchers received a 911 call from a family home in a quiet residential neighborhood in Ontario, Canada. On the phone, Jennifer Pan told police that she was home with her parents when gunmen broke into the house and demanded money.

Jennifer, the only surviving witness, said that the intruders tied her up, shot her parents, and fled the scene, according to Netflix . Jennifer’s mother, Bich Ha, passed away instantly, but the young woman’s father miraculously survived the gunshot wound and was in dire need of medical care.

While it was first thought that the Pans were randomly targeted in the fatal home invasion, detectives started to get suspicious of Jennifer as more details emerged. A neighbor’s security camera also captured footage of three men entering the house with no signs of forced entry.

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Pan was living with her parents at the time. She told her parents lies like she graduated from high school and attended college. (She even went as far as to photoshop report cards and student loan documents.) Jennifer pretended to pursue an undergraduate degree at Ryerson University (now known as Toronto Metropolitan University), and made her parents drive her to attend “classes.”

Jennifer’s dad wanted her to become a pharmacist, while her mother dreamed she would become a professional pianist. However, she wanted a life differently than what her parents wished. Instead, she spent her time dating Daniel Wong, a drug dealer with a criminal record. The Pans disapproved of the couple’s relationship — and when they found out that Jennifer was lying about attending college — they forbade her from seeing Wong anymore.

That’s when Jennifer asked Wong to help her organize a plot to murder her parents, according to the documentary. They wanted the murder to look like a robbery gone wrong while Jennifer played the part of a witness. They hired three hitmen (David Mylvaganam, Lenford Crawford, and Eric Carty), who entered the home and carried out the invasion.

Investigators started to unravel Jennifer’s web of lies. When her father came out of his coma, he revealed that his daughter appeared to know the people who broke into their home. Finally, Jennifer confessed to hiring the killers and leaving her house unlocked. She claimed that she was the target for the murder-for-hire plot — not her parents. Tens months earlier, she asked someone else to kill her parents, according to Tudum.

Where Is Jennifer Pan Now?

In January 2015, Jennifer Pan was sentenced to life in prison, with no parole for 25 years, for first-degree murder and life for attempted murder, according to Canadian news outlet CBC .

Wong, Mylvaganam, and Crawford were also convicted and received life sentences with the possibility of parole after 25 years. After initially receiving a mistrial, Carty was sentenced to 18 years in prison in December 2015. He died in jail in 2018.

Jennifer is currently serving her life sentence at Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, but her time in court is not over. In May 2023, The Court of Appeal for Ontario overturned the first-degree murder conviction for Pan and her three co-accused. (The court dismissed the appeals on the attempted murder convictions.) The court argued that the trial judge should have given the jury a chance to select second-degree murder and manslaughter as the verdict. As of August 2023, the Supreme Court of Canada is deciding whether or not to hear the appeal.

Where Is Jennifer Pan’s Dad, Huei Hann Pan, Now?

Huei Hann Pan testified at Jennifer’s 2014 murder trial. On the stand, he said that was shot in the head, and when he regained consciousness, he witnessed his wife dead on the floor.

Hann Pan also claimed that the hit men had a conversation with his daughter and seemed to know them. “He talked to my daughter. I could not hear what was being said, but they were speaking softly,” the father said, per the Toronto Star .

Huei Hann Pan is currently in his 70s and has kept a low profile since the trial.

What Jennifer Did is now streaming on Netflix. Watch the official trailer below.

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Civil War is a brutal epic that takes no prisoners

Alex Garland's haunting new movie is too close for comfort.

Alex Garland's new movie offers a deep dive into a haunting, too-close-for-comfort modern war, boiling down current political tensions and bringing the all-too-seen imagery of armed conflicts into the pristine cities of the US.

We've seen places like New York being devastated by zombies, climate disasters, aliens, ghosts and even Marvel superheroes, but this is a different kind of destruction. This is not an alienating fantasy, but feels rather like an ominous sight of a not-so-distant future.

Famous for his philosophically-charged sci-fi stories like Ex Machina and Annihilation , the British writer and director delivers his closest-to-reality movie while staying true to his veiled warnings to humanity.

Well, here it's not veiled at all — Civil War is as clear as day, every single thought as loud as the bombs dropping from the sky.

The movie is not interested in the particulars of the conflict, instead focusing on a group of journalists who are reporting from the line of fire on the conflict that has taken over the US.

Experienced photographer Lee (an excellent Kirsten Dunst), hot-headed reporter Joel ( Narcos ' Wagner Moura), veteran political journalist Sammy ( Dune 's Stephen McKinley Henderson) and newcomer Jessie ( Priscilla 's Cailee Spaeny ) are some of the professionals working in New York City to feed images of the ongoing conflict to the media.

Lee's exhaustion from years of witnessing death overseas is wearing on her while Jessie (her self-confessed biggest admirer) is eager to put herself in danger. Meanwhile, Sammy is living his last hurrah before retiring and Joel just wants to get the exclusive no matter what.

As representatives of different generations of journalists, their dynamics are endearing, quickly becoming the emotional core of a movie that sometimes feels emotionally detached from its most gruesome images. They are not immaculate heroes, though, as the movie offers a beautifully complex reflection on the tricky ethics of war reporting.

When the journalists' sources reveal that the President (played by Nick Offerman) is about to be cornered and executed in the White House, they team up and travel all the way to Washington DC in order to secure one last interview.

As viewers will soon enough realise, Civil War leaves many questions unanswered.

We hear Texas and California have joined forces in a so-called Western Front, and that the President is on an unusual third mandate, suggesting he might be illegally holding onto power. In the end, it doesn't really matter if we understand what is happening. It feels like part of the purpose of the movie.

In one revealing scene, the journalists find themselves in the middle of a shoot-out in an abandoned theme park. Two snipers are trying to kill a shooter, who in turn is targeting them from one of the windows of their country house. They don't know how this little battle started, who they are shooting at or what side they are fighting for.

That's how the whole conflict feels in the movie — people simply have turned against each other, shooting before asking, swallowed in a blurry chaos.

While the particularities of the war seem distant, Garland's imagery feels very real.

We've seen this post-apocalyptic visual style on screen before, from Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men to the French limited series The Collapse ( L' Effondrement ) and even zombie movies like Garland's own 28 Days Later . Even the helicopter shots seem to evoke Apocalypse Now . However, the movie stays true to real-life images instead of aiming for alienating grandeur.

Iconic monuments are desecrated by violence, football stadiums are turned into refuges for displaced people, currency is no longer valid and essential resources are scarce. The mayhem North Americans would usually see on their TVs through reports on their armed ventures in foreign countries is now flooding their own streets.

Some viewers might even think of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021 (particularly during the movie's thrilling ending), but it would be short-sighted to reduce the movie to an answer to that incident.

True to his writing style, Garland strips everything down to its essence, avoiding an overpacked story, delivering memorable images and exploring crucial concepts.

Civil War is not only about the Earth-shattering ramifications of political tensions and gun politics or the violent possibilities of an armed conflict, but also about how that story becomes history; how the present is reported, recorded and afterwards remembered; how journalists' role in that is far from simple and filled with ethical conundrums, and yet entirely essential.

Other aspects of the movie will catch the viewers' attention, but Garland's beautiful portrayal of journalism is, probably, the gem hidden amongst the brutality of the setting.

In one scene, Dunst's Lee says her work as a war photographer has been a warning that went unheard. "And here we are," she laments. Alex Garland seems to feel a bit like that too, as Civil War becomes his clearest, loudest warning to date.

Civil War is now out in cinemas.

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Deputy Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over seven years, mostly for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas . 

Her work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema in the UK. 

She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service .    During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world, and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London.     Now based in the UK, Mireia joined Digital Spy in June 2023 as Deputy Movies Editor. 

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