Alongside Enemy in 2013, Denis Villeneuve released another fantastic project
with his thriller film Prisoners, starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Out of all the films
on Denis filmography, Prisoners is my personal favourite, and one of the main reasons why is
because the filmmaker proved he could tell a story through a narrative maze
that connects to so many different elements on display. In this video, I'm going to be
giving you my thoughts on Prisoners, exploring how Denis Villeneuve creates a perfect film
through symbolism in the story and characters. This video essay continues my Road to Dune series,
where I create content on all of the dune adaptations, Frank Herbert's original novel,
Denis Villeneuve's filmography and his upcoming 2021 film. During the build-up,
I will also be covering any news and information surrounding the director's latest project.
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to check me out on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram at cortex videos, which is all linked in
the description below. But without further ado, let's dive into Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners.
So while the main story of Prisoners is about the kidnapping of two young girls,
the movie as a whole is an examination of the kinds of prisons people find themselves in,
physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Mazes end up being a bigger deal
and the whole concept of a maze is that people become lost in the complications
of that structure. Prisoners put this concept to use by showing how people struggle to work through
and escape from their traumas. Whether that’s the death of a child, the loss of faith,
murdering a murderer, having your child abducted, or even torturing someone you know is guilty
but they won’t confess. But the idea of the maze goes beyond the characters
to even the structure of the story. Prisoners could have presented information typically
by giving details in a chronological way that’s easy to understand. Instead, it purposefully
scatters important details throughout the story, without chronological context, meaning that it’s
easy to forget them or not connect them the way we should. This is done in order to have Prisoners
become a narrative maze. The simple progress of the story is an artistic choice to create the
sense of sense of something you can’t quite solve and that there’s more going on than you may have
realized. Denis and his team accomplished this by placing key backstory and exposition details
throughout the film without having a single scene that clearly ties them all together.
This means that it’s on the viewer to complete the few missing pieces of the whole puzzle.
And there are two more elements that make Prisoners an even deeper kind of cinematic
project. One is thematic and the other is how the story is constructed. Thematically,
beyond mazes are huge motifs. The main villain is in a war against the Christian God,
while the hero is named after a god of Norse mythology. There are characters named
Grace and Joy and many times throughout the film, there’s an emphasis on trees.
Is it a coincidence that Joy’s last name is Birch, which is also a very common tree in
America. Denis is essentially saying something about the collision between civilization
and nature, Christianity and the Old Gods. And then we come to the construction of the story.
The last shot of the movie is Jake Gyllenhaal's Detective Loki hearing
a faint whistle. We know it’s coming from Hugh Jackman's Keller Dover, trapped underground, but
unfortunately, Loki doesn’t know this. There’s this tension as Loki hears the whistle but
dismisses it, hears it again, over and over, and before we see him decide to investigate or leave,
the movie ends. We’re ultimately left on the question of... Does Loki save Keller or
not? Maybe the most impressive thing to me about Prisoners is that almost everything that happens
in the movie is a clue for Loki. The question is will he put it all together and solve the puzzle?
Which really is a question for us as the viewer. Have we been paying attention to
all the clues that point to whether Loki will or won’t find Keller? It's interesting but
it perfectly summarises the complete construction and point of the story.
And this can all relate back to the title of the movie. The title is of course simple but
that simplicity can disarm you. At first, we might think it applies to the abduction of Joy and Anna.
They’re prisoners.. but then midway through the movie, Keller kidnaps Paul Dano's Alex Jones and
keeps him as a prisoner in gruelling fashion. And what do you know, at the end of the movie,
Keller’s imprisoned by Alex’s aunt, Holly. As a viewer, you might think that’s the end of it.
But the more you dig into Prisoners it eventually becomes clear as day that the entire movie is
this layered exploration of various types of prisons, being physical, mental, emotional,
and spiritual. Beyond that, the story plays out in such a way that it intentionally leaves viewers to
put together key details. Compare this to other crime thrillers and most of those movies do the
traditional thing of stacking information so that as the plot progresses we feel more knowledgeable
and empowered about what’s going on. You start the movie in a place of ignorance
but end with a sense of superiority in understanding nearly every aspect. But Prisoners
doesn’t neatly stack its information. Instead, it gives you a pile of puzzle pieces and if you want
to get the full picture, you have to unite all of these elements. In this way, the movie itself
becomes a bit of a prison, a kind of artistic piece that we can lose ourselves in. And all
of this is of course on purpose as midway through the film the motif of the maze is introduced. At
first, the maze might seem like nothing more than the ravings of a lunatic, put into the script to
add to the mystery and tension of the film. But, like the title, things aren’t always so simple.
Bob Taylor’s house has mazes drawn on the walls and when he’s taken into police custody,
the police demand to know exactly where the abducted girls are, with him, in turn,
spending 3 hours drawing a maze to show them. The dead body discovered in the priest’s house just so
happens to have a maze necklace on. There’s an FBI book about a serial abductor who was
obsessed with mazes. And the imprisoned Alex Jones eventually tells his captor that the girls are,
“In the maze.” Now while this does play into the drama and mystery of a crime thriller,
when you look at the structure of Prisoners and how it tells its story and reveals information,
there’s an understanding that the maze stuff wasn’t just to escalate the thriller aspects.
It serves a meta-purpose to make us aware of how to watch and understand the movie. And
while this technique is more common in artistic projects, like we said before it connects to
everything surrounding the idea of imprisonment. It reinforces the theme because a maze can be,
after all, a prison and almost every character in Prisoners is working through some kind of maze.
But again, it’s also a clue from the filmmaker to treat the movie as a maze.
We have the display of Physical imprisonment. Holly keeps the two girls and eventually keeps
Keller in captivity. Keller also takes Alex captive. The priest traps Mr Jones
in the basement to die. And Loki literally arrests people with the intent of sending them to prison.
Then we have emotional imprisonment. The disappearance of Anna and Joy emotionally
devastates the Dover and Birch families and Grace, Anna’s mother, goes from sad denial of reality
to drugging herself into oblivion. Franklin, Joy’s dad, objects to Keller’s treatment of Alex but
participates for a time because he feels he has no other option if he wants to get his daughter back.
There's also Psychological imprisonment. Alex and Bob Taylor both suffer from the trauma of
their kidnapping and there’s a contrast to how their trauma expresses itself. Alex has headed
towards introversion. We, the audience, struggle to understand what’s going through Alex’s mind
and compared to Bob, he almost completely externalized his pain. He draws mazes on walls,
imitates kidnapping children and yet he’s equally difficult to understand.
And finally, there's Spiritual imprisonment. Holly and her husband found it impossible to
move beyond their belief that God had wronged them and because of that, they’ve tortured
other families to cause a similar crisis of faith and turn more people against God.
And Grace's character is the embodiment of the spiritual crisis the Joneses hope to enact.
With the motifs in mind, we can finally get to what I think is the most interesting
thing about Prisoners. The story, the characters and the filmmaking is great.
But how the movie explores religion and puts Christianity in conversation with other religions
and spiritualities is pretty incredible. Prisoners is about spirituality and the complicated nature
we have with it. How do we make sense of the bad that happens in the world? How do we have
faith in the arising of bad events? And how do we make sense of the miracles in our lives?
The big issue every character has is acceptance. Accepting not just the bad but the good as well.
Holly and her husband could have found comfort in one another and instead, their crusade ends
up resulting in both of their deaths. Bob Taylor survived his abduction but can’t
move beyond the trauma of it. Grace completely falls apart in the wake of Anna’s disappearance,
to the point of not functioning. People can’t accept freedom, they can’t accept loss and it’s
really just Loki and Keller who keep their faith. Keller in his belief that Alex Jones
knows where the girls are and Loki in his own inclinations and deductions. They accept
what their instincts tell them and both end up playing the hero. Keller’s faith in preparation
creates a chain of events that causes his daughter to leave a whistle in the hole in
Holly’s yard and it’s that particular whistle that he uses to signal Loki
at the end. And while Loki’s faith in following signs guides him right to the imprisoned Keller,
the fact that our two most faithful characters end the movie together, each trusting in their faith,
is actually pretty impressive. But saying this, as the movie ends right before Loki saves Keller,
that sense of catharsis is something Prisoners denies us. Which is, all in all,
pretty fitting to the idea of the movie. By not showing Keller’s rescue, we’re left with a choice.
Do we have faith in Loki or don’t we? What ending do we personally choose? And what fate for Keller
do we actually accept? By leaving that choice in our hands and open, the film becomes a
moment of reflection, of confrontation, and it perfectly asks you what you believe in.
But that was my video essay on Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners and how the director gave us a narrative
maze of perfection. I'm especially intrigued to see how the filmmaker will choose to tackle
the narrative in Dune and with the story being incredibly dense and full of detail, it will
definitely be a hard job to pull off. But this is something that Denis has proved he can tackle
from different directions with varying projects in the past so it's very likely that we are in store
for another fantastic adaptation from the director. But let me know down below what you
personally thought towards Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, alongside things that you find
interesting about his 2013 film.
My next video in this Road to Dune marathon continues with Denis Villeneuve's Sicario,
where I will be going deeper into how the director displayed moral ambiguity through an
unbiased lens on the Drug War. This will be released in the next week
alongside much more content on Dune 2021 coming over the next few months.
To stay up to date with this series along with all the latest news on Denis Villeneuve's DUNE,
then subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications. Also if you enjoyed this video
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But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.