Released this week: Prisoners
Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), a deeply religious man who runs a struggling carpentry business, attends a Thanksgiving dinner with his family at the house of their neighbors, the Birches. After dinner, the families’ young daughters, Anna Dover and Joy Birch, go missing. After a police hunt, an RV that had been parked in the neighborhood is found outside a gas station next to a wooded area. When Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes to confront the RV’s driver, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), Alex tries to speed away and crashes into the trees.
Alex is revealed during his interrogation to have the approximate I.Q. of a ten year old, and is released due to lack of evidence. Keller, convinced that Alex knows where the girls are, abducts and imprisons Alex in an abandoned apartment building owned by Keller. With the reluctant help of Joy’s father, Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard), Keller repeatedly beats Alex for days for information. Overcome with guilt, Franklin tells his wife Nancy (Viola Davis) what they have done and brings her to see Alex. The Birches eventually decide to let Keller continue the torture, neither helping nor interfering. After Alex mentions escaping from a maze, Keller visits Alex’s aunt, Holly Jones (Melissa Leo), to gauge her reaction when he mentions mazes.Loki confronts a suspect named Bob Taylor (David Dastmalchian) at his home and finds that the walls are covered in drawings of intricate mazes. In a back room, locked crates filled with maze books, snakes, and bloody children’s clothing are discovered. In custody, Taylor manages to grab a gun and commits suicide. Taylor is revealed to have faked the killings; the blood on the children’s clothes is pig’s blood and the clothing had been stolen after the abduction.
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Days later, Joy Birch is found drugged and is hospitalized, but Anna is still missing. In her drugged state, Joy rambles that Keller was there. Keller rushes off as Loki chases him. Loki loses him, but heads toward the apartment complex and discovers the imprisoned Alex. Keller goes to Holly’s, realizing that is where Joy had heard him. Holly holds Keller at gunpoint, drugs him, and imprisons him in a hidden pit. She reveals that she was responsible for the abduction of the girls and, with her husband, for several others before, including Bob Taylor, in order to “wage a war on God” to make people lose their faith. Alex was the first child they abducted. (Subtle clues, given to the viewers through the course of the film, imply that the tied-up, mummified corpse found earlier in the basement of one of the suspects in the girls’ disappearance, Father Richard Dunn, is the long-missing husband, who confessed his crimes to the priest.)Loki goes to Holly’s house to tell her about Alex being found. He discovers Anna and is wounded by Holly, whom he kills. He rushes Anna to the hospital where she recovers. Late, alone at the Jones residence, Loki hears the faint sound of Keller blowing a whistle in the hidden pit and turns around to investigate as the film ends.
