The movie I selected to write about is Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners. This movie came out last year, in 2013, and was written by Aaron Guzikowski. In the movie, two young girls go missing on Thanksgiving day. The girls had been outside with their older siblings and started messing around on a camper that apparently someone was in at the time. The girls then go back to the house to find a whistle that one of them had lost earlier. When the families realize that the girls are missing, the older siblings bring up the person from the camper. The police find the camper and arrest the strange, 20 something year old man who was driving it. After 48 hours and no charges being placed on the young man, the police were forced to let him go. Not believing that the young man was really innocent, the fathers take matters into their own hands. They kidnap the man (who has the IQ of a ten-year old), torture him, and try to gain information from him. Those were some tough scenes to watch as the man would not give up any information.
Almost a week after the girl’s disappearance, another suspicious young man is being held by police for questioning. After searching his house and finding drawings of mazes all over the house, the police found articles of clothes that belonged to the young girls. When being questioned about the location of the girls, the young man managed to get ahold of the detective’s gun and shot himself in the head.
One girl had managed to escape and was picked up along the side of the road and brought to a local hospital. The father figures out that the aunt of the young man they kidnapped had something to do with the girls disappearance, and immediately drove to her house to talk to her. The aunt manages to get a gun turned on him first, drugged him, and threw him into a hole on her property. The detective gets to the aunt’s house just as she is injecting the last young girl with poison. After a small gun fight, ending with a dead aunt and a non-lethal shot to the head of the detective, the detective manages to get himself and the girl to the safety of the hospital for treatment.
Both young girls are now safe and alive, but the one father is still missing. After being released from the hospital, the detective went back to the aunt’s property to see if anything had turned up. After all the other investigators leave the scene, we hear a faint whistle. The camera focuses on the detective and we can see in his face that he has it figured out and that the father will be saved.
This movie was filmed chronologically. I think that this made sense for the movie as the audience was able to follow along. As new information unfolded for the families and the detective, we were right there with them figuring it out as well. There were definitely moments of foreshadowing that we knew would come up later in the movie. The whistle was a good example. The young girl was looking for her whistle within the first five minutes of the movie, then when the father was kidnapped he found the little girls whistle in the same hole that he was being held in. Then at the end when we hear the faint whistle, we know that the father is still alive.
Images retrieved from http://basementrejects.com/review/prisoners-2013/
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