prisoners movie review in tamil

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2023 Directed by Koshal Ram Vaikunth

A jaded 21-year-old smoking addict and a physically abused 15 year-old runaway find unexpected solace and have conversations about life in a brief encounter that could go a long way in defining how they view happiness.....

Ashwin Kumar Roshan Raj

Director Director

Koshal Ram Vaikunth

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

Hrishekesh Vaitheeshwar Prakash

Editor Editor

Subash Rammohan

Cinematography Cinematography

RakitaRakita Studios

Releases by Date

12 dec 2023, releases by country.

15 mins   More at TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by SANJAY BOHRA ★★★½ 1

Solid first foot forward. Just that felt if the characters were more vulnerable to eachother where a scene in which  they could  rant their hearts-off. This could’ve made an even stronger emotional connect.  Expecting nothing but even better work from my boy🤝

Review by Koshal Ram

Our short prisoners is finally here! Please do watch it, share it and let us know what you think about it

www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_4935rQrZA

and please do drop out a review (https://boxd.it/Kbja)

Do support us, thanks!

Review by Sush ★★★★★

Masterclass.

Review by Anush ★★★½

Great work guys!! Simple and neat screenplay! The emotional connect could have been better if the 21 year old opened up a bit more is what i felt... Great start da koshal!

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

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Kidnapping thrillers often lull us into a sense of safety in the opening sequences, showing the normal rhythms of life that will soon be shattered. Denis Villeneuve's "Prisoners" does not go that route. It opens with a shot of a snowy forest, where a deer quietly noses around for food. Into the frame comes the barrel of a shotgun. We hear a prayer being intoned. Boom, the deer goes down. The camera pulls back to show a father ( Hugh Jackman ) and teenage son (Dylan Minnette), in day-glo hunting gear staring at their kill through the ranks of bare trees. On the drive home, the father, who seems humorless, intense, and a bit of a bore, lectures the son on how to always be prepared for the worst in life. 

This opening is so heavy-handed that it's amazing that the film doesn't instantly collapse under its symbolic weight. Shot by the great Roger Deakins , regular cinematographer for the Coen brothers, the movie is drenched in rain and drained of color. Aspects of "Prisoners" are effective, but for the most part it's rather ridiculous (despite the fact that it clearly wants to be taken super-seriously), and there's an overwrought quality to much of the acting.

Keller Dover (Jackman) is an independent contractor who lives with his wife Grace ( Maria Bello ) and two kids in a suburban neighborhood. He loves Bruce Springsteen , "The Star-Spangled Banner," hunting, and hoarding canned goods, gas masks, and survivalist gadgets in his basement. On Thanksgiving, the Dovers go to dinner with a neighboring family, Franklin and Nancy Birch ( Terrence Howard and Viola Davis ), who have two kids the same age. While the parents drink wine and talk in the living room, the two little girls ask if they can take a walk. It is a walk from which they do not return. Panic ensues, especially when it becomes clear that a creepy RV, which had been seen parked in the neighborhood earlier, has vanished. Detective Loki ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) is assigned to the case.

The RV's owner, Alex Jones ( Paul Dano ), is dragged in for questioning. Forensics say the RV is clean of physical evidence, but Alex is strange. he speaks in a whispery high voice that makes him sound like a pre-teen. It is not inconceivable to think that he may be hiding something. This is clearly Dover's take, and he and Loki immediately start to butt heads about the course of the investigation. When Jones is released due to lack of evidence (into the custody of his aunt, played by Melissa Leo ), Dover takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping Jones, and holding him hostage in an abandoned dilapidated building. Dover loops in Franklin Birch on his plan to beat the truth out of Jones. Birch is horrified at the sight of Jones tied to a sink, but he ignores his own moral compass in the face of Dover's furious certainty. This is one of the subtler points of the script: how certainty can override doubt with sheer force, and how doubt is often essential to maintaining our humanity.  

Hugh Jackman huffs and puffs and screams and roars throughout the film, and it becomes monotonous, but what all that behavior tells us is that this is a weak man who needs to feel powerful. In one telling moment, while murmuring the "Our Father," he is unable to say "as we forgive those who trespass against us." He has a veritable arsenal in his basement, his family could withstand a mustard gas attack as well as the Zombie Apocalypse, but he couldn't protect his daughter on a simple walk through a safe neighborhood. And he's so convinced that Alex Jones is the guy that he is blind to other possibilities. Meanwhile, his wife lies in bed, tranquilizing herself into a stupor.

Gyllenhaal is great here in a role that must have looked rather uninteresting on the page. Aaron Guzikowski's script, so packed with religious symbols that verges on a sermon, is excellent in its spare and compelling portrait of Loki. The only image of the character outside the context of his job is his introductory scene, eating Thanksgiving dinner in an empty, fluorescent-lit Chinese restaurant as the rain batters down outside. The only thing we learn about his past is that he was in a boys' home and was raised in foster care. His knuckles and neck are sprinkled with tattoos, including a cross on one thumb. He's got a facial tic. We meet a lot of creeps in "Prisoners", and you get the sense that Detective Loki could have been one of them if he hadn't become a cop. It's a nice performance from Gyllenhaal, and its subtlety is welcome considering all the teeth gnashing going on in other performances.

Director Villeneuve gives us a couple of truly suspenseful scenes. One is a chase through the nighttime back yards of the neighborhood after a candlelight vigil for the two girls. The interiors of the houses seem gloomy and cramped, with walls cutting into the frame and characters coming in and out of sight: a visual correlative for the idea of people cut off from one another. But as the plot goes into high gear and we get other suspects, basement lairs and a glimpse of vast conspiracies, "Prisoners" wears out its welcome.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Prisoners (2013)

146 minutes

Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki

Hugh Jackman as Keller Dover

Paul Dano as Alex Jones

Maria Bello as Grace Dover

Melissa Leo as Holly Jones

Viola Davis as Nancy Birch

Terrence Howard as Franklin Birch

• Denis Villeneuve
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Jail movie review: An exhausting experience

Towards the end of Jail, the text on screen read, “Sila sambavangalukku piragu…” It caught me off-guard—wait, is that not why we are watching the film? Would you mind sharing with us the nature of said events? The film jumps to the aftermath when the protagonist, Karna (GV Prakash), is being asked by his friend, Kalai (Pasanga Pandi), to do pretty much what we are wondering as well: “What happened in between?” And then, the film begins filling up this forced narrative gap created for no reason except to manipulate you into feeling some curiosity. This isn’t a film that had until then shown any interest in reverse chronology, and yet, it doesn’t care about suddenly screening events from you as a gimmick.

You see this all the time in Jail—this tendency to force events and conflicts, in order to maintain the illusion of excitement. One of the women in this film— a character who serves no ostensible purpose—is said to have once been in love with a man called ‘Isthri Murugan’. From out of nowhere, this character comes in for a resolution, with a child named after her, and with a wife who’s conveniently dead. I laughed out loud when I heard this. How do you respond with warmth when the deceit in the writing is as evident?

The warning signs arrive right at the beginning, as a voice-over chatters on about the dehumanising consequences of slum resettlement, like this were a documentary. The narrator goes on almost into a critique of how slum dwellers get ‘othered’. As the story begins—after the voice-over helpfully says, “Vaanga paakalaam”, worried perhaps that we might take off—I hoped that the narrator would stop interrupting with patronising explanations. And yet, it goes on for a while. For instance, Karna’s introduction scene has him jumping into an auto, threatening an unwitting girl with a knife, and snatching her phone.

Later, we see him get manhandled by the police, and the narrator, uninvited, steps in: “It’s a ‘small theft’ but look how he is attacked as though it was a ‘big theft’.” Next, we see a man with a half-burnt face, an activist who has apparently been trying to fight the injustice of forced resettlement through legal means. The narrator jumps in with the obvious: “Ivar samooga poraali.” As opposed to what exactly? I found it impossible to shake off the notion that this film didn’t think much of its viewers.

You could even make the conclusion that in its half-hearted attempts to stand up for victims of resettlement, this film almost does them a disservice instead. It tries to be critical of the police department for exploiting young men unfairly, and yet, it portrays most young men in the locality as violent criminals, including Karna himself. One peddles drugs, one thieves, one murders… and it goes on.

How about the romantic relationship between Karna and Rosamalar (Abarnathi), for instance? Rosa is apparently feisty, so when Karna first sees her, she tries to attack him with a sickle. Karna responds, “Naane itemkaaran!” and threatens to cut her instead. Later, he compares her sweat to ‘nei’ and goes on to sing, ‘Koththu barotta, unna koththa varattaa…’ With a small act of donation, perhaps meant as a justification for his name, he wins her over, and yet, later, suggests to his friends that it’s a tactic to ‘correct’ her.

Meanwhile, Rosa, like many a Tamil film heroine afflicted with multiple personality disorder, makes the transformation into a caring, tepid lover, whose purpose becomes caretaking (read ‘ruffling hero’s hair, as he lies down on lap and recovers from guilt and grief’). Jail isn’t exactly worried about infusing characters with strength or personality. Its fundamental purpose seems to be simply to manipulate you into feeling some connection, even if tenuous, with the film.

That’s why right at the beginning, it shows us a dangerous police inspector, but is busy trying to make us laugh by mocking his hemorrhoid infection. That’s why it shows us an awkward, emotional reunion between friends, but is busy turning it into a friendship song opportunity featuring alcohol. That’s why it establishes a ‘gouravamaana’ woman who may or may not have a purpose in the film—Karna’s mother (Radhikaa)—but gets busy making her the victim of a laughable fate.

A character named Karna and an evil policeman named Perumal got me thinking about Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan. All the aerial shots of the slum’s geography reminded me of Pa Ranjith’s films like Madras and Kaala. As Karna, in delirium almost, begins dancing for no real reason, I thought of Selvaraghavan’s Kadhal Kondein. But really, it was all me, caught in a film whose characters I felt no connection with, trying to keep myself going through memories of better films.

Jail lacks the human interest and emotional depth to truly analyse lives in the locality; it lacks the patience to dig into social issues beyond rudimentary, almost exploitative mentions. Instead, it gets busy shuffling between songs, unoriginal plot twists, and convenient resolutions. You keep hearing ‘machaan’ and ‘machi’ while Karna, Rocky, and Kalai talk to each other, but does this film ever make you care about them? How did prison time change Kalai? How did the long separation affect their friendship? How did Karna and Rocky manage this separation? What binds them anyway? There’s no time to answer these questions, and yet, Jail has the time to have its hemorrhoids-affected evil policeman engage in wordplay by calling a woman called ‘Nirmala’, “Nirmoola”.

It has the time to have Rosamalar talk of an ‘Audi owner’ hitting on her, and revel in her rejection of him because he was bald. The real jail, when you are exposed to such attempts at humour in a film that’s supposed to celebrate equality and empathy, is the movie theatre.

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