100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #15: Prisoners (2013)

Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Written by Aaron Guzikowski. Starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, and Terrence Howard.

Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, like faith, does not want you to be comfortable.  It is hard to watch this work with any of the detachment one can experience when watching a horror movie. There are no clowns with sharp teeth or aliens bursting out of chest cavities to musical stings.  There is only human evil, which makes for a far more harrowing experience.  The human evil in question is the intentional abuse of children.  Few films about the subject of child abuse fail to elicit an emotional response from the watcher, in part due to the innocence of the victims and their inability to defend themselves.  For this film, you are no mere observer, the story asks for more than appreciation, it asks for participation.  It asks that you break yourself, but not for the sake of subverting expectations or winning any cheap ‘gotcha’ moment on the audience or the characters.  This film does not deal with political or topical issues, but rather universal issues.  Namely the age old issue of theodicy - the attempt to resolve faith in God with the evils that abound in the world.  

Prisoners is a rarity in the fetid Hollywood discourse on faith.  Especially when dealing with Christian characters, Hollywood tends to take a postmodern deconstructionist approach to faith.  Christians are depicted as weak or hypocritical side characters who use faith as a shield against their flaws.  Examples range from the abusive priest to the self righteous ignorant who either cannot or will not see the world for how it really is. These types of faithful are often pitted against a savvy, self reliant hero who has lax sexual morality but can shoot any firearm with pinpoint accuracy at faceless goons in the endless cycle of world ending maguffins.  These characters offer no original criticism or insight and are just as quickly forgotten as they are churned out.  Prisoners, on the other hand, attacks the fundamental question of the human experience; if God is good, why is evil permitted? 

It is the maturity and ruthlessness of this attack on the problem of faith that causes its two-fold horror.  On one hand, the subject matter is so methodically severe and presented with masterclasses in acting, direction and writing that the watcher is forced to feel every second of the film.  On the other hand, it demands that you justify your morality along with the characters. This is a daunting task for a generation drowning in emotivism and selfishness.  It would be far easier to hand the audience a clear message telling them why to believe one course is justified while condemning another, as the vast majority of modern films do.  But Prisoners is not a vehicle for a message; it is an honest exploration of human failing and evil.  Viewers more accustomed to modern writing may find the lack of a clear protagonist confusing, but here is the most interesting layer to Prisoners: we are tasked with finding our own protagonist, weighing all characters' reactions to the horrors unfolding against our own sensibilities.  No character is portrayed as right or wrong, but struggling to reconcile with or escape the maze of their traumas. 

Prisoners relies heavily on maze imagery, both in the pagan and Christian senses.  There are several sequences that use these puzzles to shed a light on the fractured pieces of the obviously imperfect cast.  Labyrinths are used throughout literature and art to both represent physical and mental limitations.  We can only escape through heroic competence and perseverance or, as more common, with help.  All of the main characters deliberately chose the former, at great personal expense.  They belligerently stick to their own course of action, despite all of the developments in the kidnapping case coming from coincidences or outside help.  Prisoners offers this refusal to accept help of any kind as the bleak alternative to faith.  What happens when you insist on self reliance and still end up helpless?  Where then will you turn?  

The film starts with a slow shot of one of the main characters, Keller Dover, saying the Lord's prayer while hunting with his son.  After his son makes the shot and they are on their way home with the deer, Keller says that preparedness is the best defense, saying throughout the film variations of ‘pray for the best, prepare for the worst.’  This sets up the main takeaway from the film, namely that there is an upward limit to faith founded in self reliance.  Keller struggles with this limit up to the final moments of the film, taking every development and twist in the story as an opportunity to wrest control from God and the police.  And in both cases, his way becomes clearly lost.  At every opportunity he chooses his way over the way of obedience and humility and in doing so, digs his own metaphorical and physical grave.  Keller is willing, like many of us, to only trust God as long as our agenda is being met.  We, like Keller, are unwilling or unable to surrender ourselves to the Cross which is already, but not yet.  We refuse to believe that our suffering could be anything but punishment, so we turn to self reliance to dig ourselves out of our trials.  Like Peter when Jesus offers to wash his feet, we pridefully assume it is our place to somehow prove to God we are worthy and can participate in His vision on our own merit.  

Prisoners is essentially a detective film and, as such, this piece has aimed to speak only in generalities as not to give away any of the many twists in this tale.  Prisoners is an incredibly bleak film, but there are good, true, and beautiful things to be found providing the viewers do not lose themselves in the depicted misery.  There is persistence in the face of evil, and when characters are faced with their own limitations, true blind faith is what brings about the happy resolutions amid the many tragic endings.  In both cases of self abandonment there is literal and metaphorical blindness that forces the characters out of themselves and into providence.   

Prisoners as a whole is very reminiscent of a scene in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.  The scene is between brothers Ivan and Alyosha, where Ivan details a litany of abuses against children that seem extreme even in comparison to the film being discussed today. What makes this litany of Ivan's especially heart wrenching is that Dostoyevsky pulled from real world events.  Ivan concludes that “It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its tears to ‘dear, kind God’!”  Alyosha’s only response, in imitation of Christ, is a kiss.  This mirrors the eventual reveal that the kidnapper of Keller’s child was motivated not out of hatred for Keller or some distaste of children.  The kidnappers state that the kidnappings and killings were a “war on God,” the final extrapolation of a worldview based on competence.  If we continue in belligerent, ungodly self reliance, we incur a debt to God through our own actions.  Each choice we make that seeks to drive control from the hands of the Maker into our own all too fallible capabilities separates us from the Plan, until at last we have no options left but two: to shed ourselves and embrace the unknowable history already written or to wage a war against God.