The film follows the abduction of two young girls in Pennsylvania and the subsequent search for the perpetrator by the police. After police arrest a young suspect and release him, the father of one of the daughters takes matters into his own hands.
In the fictional city of Conyers, Pennsylvania, the Dover and Birch families celebrate Thanksgiving together. Before dinner, girls Anna Dover and Joy Birch play on a parked RV. After dinner, they leave unchaperoned to look for Anna's missing red whistle and disappear. Detective Loki responds to a police call about an RV matching the description, which crashes after a poor attempt at fleeing. Loki arrests the man inside, Alex Jones.
During interrogation, Loki determines that Alex's diminished IQ prevents him from planning a kidnapping and his RV contains no forensic evidence. He questions Alex's aunt, Holly, who says her husband took off 5 years prior and they adopted Alex when he was 6. Loki runs down leads on local sex offenders and finds a decaying corpse in the basement of priest Patrick Dunn. Dunn admits to killing him after the man confessed to murdering 16 children for his "war on God".
The police release Alex to his aunt. Convinced of Alex's guilt, Anna's father Keller Dover assaults him outside the police station, where Alex whispers to him, "They didn't cry 'til I left them." After Loki finds no proof of this, Keller takes matters into his own hands by stalking Alex. When Alex sings Jingle Bells, Batman Smells, which Keller heard Anna and Joy singing on Thanksgiving, Keller kidnaps him and takes him to an empty building Keller owns. With the reluctant help of Joy's father, Franklin Birch, Keller tortures Alex for information about their daughters, to no avail. Franklin later tells his wife, Nancy, who convinces Franklin not to stop Keller but also not to help him.
Loki interviews a woman whose son was kidnapped under similar circumstances 26 years prior. She shows him a video of her son, which she's watched daily since he disappeared from the same spot the RV was first seen[4][5].
At a vigil for the girls, Loki approaches a suspicious man who flees. Loki releases a sketch of him to the community. The suspect sneaks into the Birch and Dover houses. Keller's wife Grace hears him and calls Loki. Loki deduces that Keller is why Alex has disappeared, so Loki follows Keller. Alex finally speaks, repeating "I'm not Alex" and "I waited and he never came. I just wanted to play". Suddenly, Loki pulls up outside the empty building where Keller pretends be sleeping and claims he goes to drink. With Keller's permission, Loki investigates the building but does not find Alex.
Loki arrests the suspect, Bob Taylor, at his house. The walls are covered in maze drawings and Loki opens crates filled with snakes and bloody children's clothes. Loki shows Keller and the Birch parents photos of the bloody clothes, and they identify several as Joy's and Anna's. Anxious from watching Taylor draw detailed, unsolvable mazes for hours, Loki assaults him and demands the location of the girls. Taylor grabs an officer's gun in the chaos and kills himself[6].
Back at his empty building, Keller tries to say The Lord's Prayer but chokes up on the words "As we forgive those who trespass against us". He continues torturing Alex, who only cryptically talks about a maze. Keller visits Alex's aunt Holly, who says that Alex's stuttering stems from a childhood accident involving snakes her husband kept. Holly and her husband lost their faith after their son died of cancer, and adopted Alex as a way to cope.
Loki matches the maze pattern in Taylor's drawings to the maze on the necklace Dunn's corpse was wearing. At Taylor's house, Loki is informed that most of the bloody clothes are store-bought and soaked with pig blood, but he still doesn't know how Taylor had Anna and Joy's clothes. Below a window outside the Dover house, Loki finds Taylor's footprints and a sock matching Anna's, and he realizes that Taylor wasn't the kidnapper. He is then immediately called to the hospital.
The drugged Anna and Joy attempted to escape, but only Joy succeeds and is hospitalized. Joy remembers little, but when questioned by Keller, tells him, "You were there." He immediately rushes out. Loki gives chase but drives to Keller's building, finding Alex instead. Keller drove to Holly's house to find Anna, where Holly pulls a gun. Keller's cellphone rings so Holly makes him drop down the kitchen sink disposal, but he secretly answers it first; Holly does not destroy the phone before guiding him to her yard. She explains that before the disappearance of her husband, they abducted children as part of their war on God to avenge their son's death, and to create demons out of the traumatized parents. Alex (Barry Milland) was their first abduction and Bob was their second[7][5]. After drugging and wounding him, Holly imprisons Keller in a hidden pit in her yard. Keller finds his daughter's red whistle in the maze.
By the time Loki pulls up to Holly's house, Keller's truck is nowhere to be seen. Loki enters Holly's house and finds a photo of her late husband wearing the same maze necklace found on the corpse in Dunn's basement. Realizing that Holly is the kidnapper, he searches the house and finds her giving Anna an injection. In a shootout, Loki is grazed by a bullet and responds by shooting Holly in the face, killing her. He rushes to bring Anna to the hospital before he collapses.
The next morning, a recuperating Anna and Joy visit Loki in his hospital room to thank him. Grace talks with Loki, justifying her husband's actions by reaffirming their belief in God. Anna says she found her whistle the day she was kidnapped but has since lost it again. Later, Loki wanders the crime scene at Holly's house, when he faintly hears a whistle blowing; it is implied that Loki eventually finds the pit and rescues Keller[8].
Aaron Guzikowski wrote the script for the 2009 Annual Black List, and based on a short story he wrote, involving "a father whose kid was struck by a hit-and-run driver and then puts this guy in a well in his backyard". That short story was partially inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".[10]
Ultimately Guzikowski would credit producer Mark Wahlberg for getting the project on its feet, stating, "He was totally pivotal in getting the film made. That endorsement helped it get around."[10] Principal photography began in Georgia in February 2013.[12]
Prisoners premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and was released theatrically in Canada and the United States on September 20, 2013. It was originally rated NC-17 by the MPAA "for substantial disturbing violent content and explicit images"; after being edited, it was re-rated R "for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout".[14]
Box office
Prisoners opened in North America on September 20, 2013, in 3,260 theaters and grossed $20,817,053 in its opening weekend, averaging $6,386 per theater and ranking #1 at the box office. After 77 days in theaters, the film ended up earning $61,002,302 domestically and $61,124,385 internationally, earning a worldwide gross of $122,126,687, above its production budget of $46million.[2]
Reception
Critical response
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 81% based on 249 reviews. The website's critical consensus states: "Prisoners has an emotional complexity and a sense of dread that makes for absorbing (and disturbing) viewing."[15] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 53 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[16]
Christopher Orr of The Atlantic wrote: "Ethical exploration or exploitation? In the end, I come down reservedly on the former side: the work done here by Jackman, Gyllenhaal, and especially Villeneuve is simply too powerful to ignore."[17] Ed Gibbs of The Sun Herald wrote: "Not since Erskineville Kings, in 1999, has Hugh Jackman appeared so emotionally exposed on screen. It is an exceptional, Oscar-worthy performance."[18]Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote that Gyllenhaal was "exceptional" and that "Villeneuve takes his unflashy time building character and revealing troubled psyches in the most unlikely of places."[19]
In 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times' list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 121.[21]
Not all reviews were positive, however. Writing in The New Republic, David Thomson declared that the film was "weary after ten minutes" and furthermore "hideous, cruel, degrading, depressing, relentless, prolonged, humorless, claustrophobic, and a mockery of any surviving tradition in which films are entertaining".[22] A mixed review came from Sheila O'Malley of RogerEbert.com, who gave the film 2.5 stars out of a possible 4. She wrote that Jackman's performance grew "monotonous" and that the film sometimes verged on pretentiousness, but was redeemed by a few excellent suspense sequences and Gyllenhaal's performance, whose "subtlety is welcome considering all the teeth gnashing going on in other performances".[23]
Audiences
Audiences polled by CinemaScore initially gave the film a grade "B+" on an A+ to F scale, but Warner Bros asked for a recount by the service and later said the film received a grade "A−".[24][25]
Top ten lists
Prisoners was listed on various critics' top ten lists.[26]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
