Prisoners (***1/4)

This suspense drama deals with missing children, an angry father (Hugh Jackman) determined to get them back, and a possible suspect (Paul Dano) who appears to be simple but may know more than he’s letting on. In other words, it has all the ingredients of a shitty revenge flick, or a Death Wish remake. But it isn’t.

It’s a December day in Pennsylvania when two little girls go missing. (Maria Bello plays Jackman’s wife, and Terrence Howard and Viola Davis play the parents of one of the girls.) A police detective who’s solved all his cases (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a seemingly obvious perpetrator (Dano) suggest that the crime will be solved quickly. But the expected forensic evidence doesn’t implicate the suspect. And the detective’s discovery of a old man’s body in a cellar suggests a more complicated scenario.

As he did in he previous feature, Incendies, director Denis Villeneuve contructs the story like a puzzle and makes the quasi-suburban nowhere-ness of the setting seem as memorable as he did the  Middle Eastern desert in his previous film.  The script is by Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband).

There is some violence in the movie, but it is not cathartic. It is difficult, and the movie makes you feel conflicted and a little creepy. Nearly all the characters have moral uncertainty. It’s so well put together that I didn’t mind so much that the explanation for what happened is extremely far-fetched.

IMDb link

Mother (***1/2)

How often do you see a mystery that’s both unpredictable and plausible, and novel to boot?

At the center of the story is the title character (Hye-ja Kim), the only parent to an only son who’s kind of slow, but easygoing, at least when he’s not getting called “retard” by unkind folks in his small city. The movie starts with the young man nearly getting run down, but then, with a savvier friend, comically confronting the driver on a golf course. The slightly goofy air of this beginning makes it a surprise when the random hit-and-run winds up being integral to the son’s subsequent arrest in the murder of a teen girl.

Things get more serious, but the goofiness doesn’t entirely disappear, and things like a “pervert phone”—in which the camera click is silenced so as to take pictures surreptitiously—become key plot points as Mother realizes that the police think they have the killer and won’t investigate. Her fierce devotion—she’s determined to see him freed even before he tells her he’s innocent—is the core of her character, and the point to which the story circuitously returns in the end. Mother, a seller of herbal remedies, seems like a simple parent of her simple son, but her efforts to win his freedom display wells of resourcefulness. The relationship with her son comes to seem less simple, too.

There are parts that may remind you of a Hitchcock movie, with Mother in the Jimmy Stewart mode of, say, The Man Who Knew too Much—Byeong-woo Lee's versatile score helps—and parts that don’t at all. The Coen Brothers might make a movie like this, but it’s actually the work of Korean writer-director Joon-ho Bong, who previously made the comic monster movie The Host and the melancholy Memories of Murder.

IMDB link

Viewed 3/16/10 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/17–22/10