Prisoners
Edgar Cochran ✝️

Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ Patron

Prisoners 2013

★★★

Watched 12 Aug 2023

Average, seldom engaging thriller with a couple of compelling performances and a miraculous cinematography by Deakins which should have been used elsewhere. I get it: crucial decisions, self-inflicted justice, bringing out the inner demons through loss of faith, all of this with a half-cooked commentary on the repercussions of unconscious biases that result in discrimination, and the brutal implications of torture. For the latter reason, the film feels unnecessarily cruel and gratuitous to an extent: watching suffering for the sake of it becomes as soulless as Ezra Miller’s current moral perception by the masses. Fincher delved before into darker subject matter without ever forgetting about the complexity of humanity’s mental and psychological spheres, be it stuck in routine or correlating criminal profiling with our perceptions of our currently infested and saturated modernity. Actually, for something even better than Fincher and more tangential to this, look no further than Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (2010).

Having this at the Letterboxd Top 250 is the equivalent of having The Prestige in there, Good Will Hunting or The Departed: Western filmmaking conventionalisms win over film innovation and actual quality, but no list is perfect.

63/100

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