Hugh Jackman’s Best Role Was in This 2013 Denis Villeneuve Thriller

Summary

• 2024’s movie landscape is unpredictable, with franchise hits like Deadpool & Wolverine contrasting with sequels that underperformed, but two artists having a great year are Denis Villeneuve and Hugh Jackman.
• Villeneuve’s 2013 film Prisoners stars Hugh Jackman and explores the effects of violence on individuals, offering a complex and uncomfortable view of human nature.
• Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal shine in Prisoners, delivering intense performances that delve deep into emotional turmoil.

2024 has been a complex year for movies so far, especially at the box office. There have been massive franchise hits, like Deadpool & Wolverine and Inside Out 2, while other expected sequels did poorly, like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Madame Web. Major artistic swings have been rewarded (Longlegs, Challengers, Civil War), others were a disaster (Horizon: An American Saga). Some hugely promoted wannabe genre blockbusters completely fizzled (Borderlands, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), and others have hit huge with the public (Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, A Quiet Place: Day One). The romance drama is even apparently back with It Ends with Us coming out of nowhere to net a huge profit, one of many films this year to make major money that critics were mostly unimpressed by. It seems that predicting financial success in the current state of Hollywood is near impossible, but among all that confusion, two men, at least, have had undeniably very good years: Denis Villeneuve and Hugh Jackman.

While the overall landscape of film today is confusing, though generally encouraging at least in terms of getting people into seats, two films that were out-and-out hits were Dune: Part Two and Deadpool & Wolverine. Both sitting comfortably within the top 10 highest-grossing films of 2024, and unlikely to be knocked out at this point, there’s not much similar between the deeply serious almost art-house hard sci-fi of Dune: Part Two and the winking fanservice superhero violent comedy of Deadpool & Wolverine other than both being sci-fi to some degree or other. The two megahits do share one major connection, though, and that’s in 2013’s dark murder mystery Prisoners, a film directed by Villeneuve and which stars Hugh Jackman as a father who goes to extreme lengths to find his missing daughter. A brutal, winding, complex film full of big emotions and wild scenes, Prisoners was a massive hit in 2013, and it may just be Jackman’s best performance of his career.

Prisoners Is a Dark and Gnarled Look at What Violence Does to People

• Prisoners takes a standard kidnapping thriller and goes far beyond what most films would show.
• Starting from the idea of the safety of home being shattered, Prisoners explores issues of lasting trauma caused by violence.

On the surface, Prisoners sounds like many movies that have come before and since: The Dover and Birch families are friends, and at a get-together, two of their daughters go missing after going out to play near an RV. The RV is tracked to a strange and suspicious local man named Alex Jones (Paul Dano), but nothing can be proved. As the daughters remain lost, a local detective (Gyllenhaal) looks for clues while the situation wreaks havoc on the lives of the families. It’s there where Prisoners departs from what most movies, even heavy crime films, would be willing to do. Coming from a script that was passed around enough that it made the 2009 version of the infamous “Black List” of the most interesting unmade film scripts, Prisoners‘ story takes a hard turn when one of the missing girls’ father, Keller Dover (Jackman), takes matters into his own hands and abducts Dano’s Alex.

What follows is brutal and often difficult to watch, as Jackman’s fatherly love and anguish over his missing daughter translates into the outright, unrelenting torture of Alex, who appears to have some form of extreme neurodivergence and may not even be capable of giving Keller the information he wants, namely, the location of the two girls. Keller even pulls the mother and father of the Birches (the great Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) into his plan, further complicating the morality of the situation. All the while, Detective Loki (Gyllenhaal), who also appears to struggle with his own issues relating to people, is conducting an intense investigation into the matter, which leads him to the darkest places of the fictional town of Conyers, Pennsylvania.

The rest of the film is complex, surprising, tense and frightening, and to say much more would give away what makes it incredible, because above all, Prisoners is deeply, uncomfortably human. What’s happening here isn’t the heroic brilliance of creative police work or the unimpeachable tenacity of citizens who have been pushed to the edge, it’s the darkness inherent in people brought to the surface in reaction to extreme, unthinkable violence. Like the controversial Funny Games (both versions), Prisoners shows that the bubble of safety that society provides, especially that of seemingly happy, well-off suburban families, is easily pierced by the weirdness and danger of life, and maybe isn’t even there to begin with. Where Funny Games stays in the moment and betrayal of having one’s home and family invaded by violence, Prisoners uses that violation as only the inciting incident, spending its long running time (2h 33m) to show the lasting effects of violence and trauma on individuals and communities.

And that’s really what Prisoners is, a study in the effects of violence on people and what different people will do when the sacred parts of their lives are threatened. Everyone in the film, like most people in real life, has a multi-layered relationship to violence, with Prisoners subtly but inevitably revealing that every character brings their own past with violence and death to the movie’s kidnapping, which itself is inextricable from that past violence. There are certainly “better” characters in the film morally, but Prisoners constantly presents the viewer with situations that have no good answer that yet demand actiion, including a life of abuse, or the loss of a child, forcing those watching to consider where their own moral lines are for what they would do, and what would make them cross those lines. Mazes are a major motif for the movie, and that’s both what the current situation in Prisoners is and a representation of the way violence and trauma trap people for years and years, if not forever.

The Cast of Prisoners Is Incredible in the Movie, but Jackman and Gyllenhaal Are on Another Level

• The “prison” of Prisoners refers to far more than physical imprisonment.
• An all-star cast including Viola Davis, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo and Paul Dano elevates the film.
• While the whole cast is good, Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman put in unbelievable performances.

The name of the film should start to make sense now, as it represents not just the actual physical holding of people, which is a big part of the movie, but also the mental and social prisons that people find themselves in. This includes the way people create prisons for themselves and others without even meaning to, becoming their own metaphorical prison wardens and even sometimes imprisoning each other mutually in different ways. Keller Rover has Alex Jones imprisoned physically, but Jones has him mentally, and by crossing the line to illegally capture, hold and torture a man, Rover has imprisoned himself within his own crime and violence. When he pulls in the Birches, they are then also imprisoned by the knowledge of the crime, forced to either go along with it and cross their own lines or do something that would put their friend and potentially even their daughter in danger.

Every actor in the film knows the assignment here and plays it with horrifying humanity, from Terrence Howard and Viola Davis being devastated by the situation and then torn by Jackman’s characters’ violent solution to the various kids having to react with much less emotional experience to horror entering their lives. Side characters aren’t as personally affected and are thus less invested in this nightmare, and one can tell who is inextricably wrapped up in these crimes just from the way they’re directed, with everyone actually involved calling on deep wells of pain and exhaustion and trauma to inform their parts. Dano is perhaps the least impressive here in a way, because this is a very stereotypically dark Dano performance, but he is still quite good at playing these kind of characters, though he’s outshone by the quiet weirdness of acting legend Melissa Leo as Holly Jones.

It’s Jackman and Gyllenhaal’s movie in the end, though, with both putting in performances that for most actors would be called unequivocally their best. Gyllenhaal’s Loki exudes isolated high-functioning outsider energy, something his Mason ring and unexplained zodiac tattoos (all Gyllenhaal’s ideas, and perhaps a reference to one of his best films) speak to, and while he’s clearly quite good at his job, it’s revealed over the film that he too has ended up who and where he is because of the complicated facts of his life. Gyllenhaal uses tics and emotional reactions that would seem unusual to many people to show that Loki is a unique individual, one who is probably good at this job for the very reasons that make it hard for him to connect with other people socially (he is shown to have, apparently, no real relationships outside of work). Gyllenhaal has said that some of the quirks he developed to play Loki still come to him when he’s trying to do other roles, speaking to the real internalization he did here, and about the characters of the film, he told NPR:

“There is not one character in the movie that has one clear through-line, who is just doing the right thing, who is a ‘good person,’ or whatever we might consider that to be. Everybody’s complicated, everybody’s really struggling.”

If Gyllenhaal is great, Jackman is amazing here. Known for his emotional depth (The Fountain, Les Misérables), ability to go intense and violent (his various roles as Wolverine) and, in general, for his massive range as someone who can do comedy and even musicals just as well as he can do action or hard drama, it’s hard to argue that Hugh Jackman has ever gone deeper into a role than in Prisoners. What makes it work so well is that, in the short early scenes before their world is shattered, Jackman’s Keller appears to be the spitting image of a “good suburban dad,” seeming endlessly affable, supportive of his family and charismatic. It takes, understandably, almost no time for that veneer to be stripped away by the violence Keller and his family are subjected to, but as talked about above, what makes Prisoners so unnervingly effective is that Keller does not hold back his anger and his actions are not, by any means, those of an unquestionable hero.

Prisoners Is Strong Evidence that Adult Dramas Can Make Money, and It Seems Like Denis Villeneuve Is Going to Keep Up that Trend

Year	Film
1998	August 32nd on Earth
2000	Maelström
2009	Polytechnique
2010	Incendies
2013	Prisoners
2013	Sicario
2016	Arrival
2017	Blade Runner 2049
2021	Dune
2024	Dune: Part Two

• Surprisingly for a film with such an intense subject, Prisoners did very well financially.
• Since Prisoners, director Denis Villeneuve has continued to make movies for adults, most of them hits.
• Denis Villeneuve’s films, along with R-rated hits like Deadpool & Wolverine, prove that movies for adults can make plenty of money, and there should be more of them.

The question of whether Keller goes too far or not is the crux of what Prisoners is doing, the primary of many such moments where the film presents the watcher with a horrible thing someone did and then the horrible things that drove them to do it. In no case does Prisoners tell the viewer what to believe about someone in the end; some are clearly worse, but overall, they all have some inciting incident that wasn’t their fault that, to put it bluntly, fucked them up. Of all the characters, though, Jackman’s Keller is the most difficult to process, as who wouldn’t do whatever they could for their children/loved ones? Watching the face of Wolverine go into a much harder gear than even that violent character is incredible, and his rage and pain are writ all over his face and body in every scene after the kidnapping.

Prisoners is nothing if not a hard movie, gorgeously shot and acted but shying away from no depiction of violence or the hardest moral quandaries. Shockingly for such a complex and difficult film, it was a massive hit when it came out, earning critical accolades (even an Oscar nom for Cinematography) and an incredible $122.1 million on only a $46 million budget. This was enormous for Villeneuve’s career, as before his films had been a fraction of that budget and only his film immediately preceding Prisoners (Incendies) had been anything close to a “major” hit, pulling in $16 million on a $6.5 million budget. Since Prisoners, Villeneuve has ascended to the highest heights of filmmaking, getting major actors and huge budgets for all of his next films, a list which so far includes Enemy, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and the two Dune adaptations.

While Villeneuve has clearly moved into an all-sci-fi portion of his career, and is finding his greatest success yet doing so, one thing remains constant in his work both since and before Prisoners: Denis Villeneuve makes films that are unapologetically for adults. In a world where the so-called “four-quadrant film,” films that appeal to men, women, people over 25 and people under, are what every major studio is looking for almost exclusively (think the jokes “for adults” in Pixar films), this is a bold and important stance to take. The boardrooms that have pushed Young Adult everything (The Acolyte being one major recent example) and have struggled to capture the market shares they’re seeking should look to work like Villeneuve’s or Deadpool & Wolverine (which recently shattered the record for an R-rated opening), or even the recent spate of horror hits like Trap and Longlegs, and recognize that people don’t just want adult films, they’ll pay for them. Whether that happens or not is a huge question mark for the future of the cinema, but with films like 2013 huge financial hit Prisoners and now the Dune saga, Denis Villeneuve is certainly doing his part, and his films should be seen by any who want that trend to continue.