Prisoners

Prisoners is an effectively moody child-abduction potboiler that spends much of its two and a half hour running time threatening to become some sort of allegory; however, its religious themes and War On Terror imagery prove to be red herrings, and while the movie is certainly less than the sum of its referents, it nonetheless works as a formally controlled genre piece.
Making his English-language debut, Quebeçois director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies) filters the thick-paperback plot—wherein two suburban girls go missing, and one of their fathers kidnaps the man he believes was responsible—through an arty sensibility that favors terse pacing and purposeful camera movements that make the action seem more enigmatic than it really is. (Attentive viewers will be able to solve most of the movie’s central crime after about an hour.) The air of mystery takes precedence over everything else; one of Villeneuve’s favorite techniques involves shooting through rain-streaked windows and focusing on the glass, turning the ostensible subjects of the frame into intriguing blurs.