‘Prisoners,’ movie review

It’s easy to make a thriller. It’s hard to make one that says something about human nature and then, like the hauntingly compelling “Prisoners,” finds something inside the genre that validates tying your nerves up in knots.

On a gray Thanksgiving Day in Pennsylvania, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), his wife Grace (Maria Bello), their teenage son and 5-year-old daughter walk across a suburban road to the home of their friends, the Birches. Keller and his son spent the morning hunting deer, and their kill is being prepared for the table.

But after dinner, panic sets in when the Kellers’ girl and her friend, the daughter of Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis), disappear while playing outside.

A camper van was seen nearby. The frightened parents focus on that with a local police detective, Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). He tracks it to the home of elderly Holly Jones (Melissa Leo) and her nephew, Alex (Paul Dano). Twentysomething Alex is mentally damaged, but was in the camper, so Keller is sure he knows where the girls are. When Alex is released by police due to lack of evidence, he becomes the target of an increasingly unhinged Keller.

Then this stealthily moralistic thriller gets deep, burrowing into the cycle of violence on a primal level. Wanting information on his daughter, Keller kidnaps Alex, keeps him in an abandoned building and beats and tortures him. The vicious behavior is not done without conscience, but, in a way, alongside it. This is the only way he knows how to save the children.

Yet Detective Loki has other leads. They include other neighborhood creeps and the discovery of a man’s corpse, and back around to a maze of violence that Keller, lost in his own fog, is now part of.

Villeneuve sets “Prisoners” to an aching grind of a score that sounds like it’s sampling sounds from inside a machine. There are themes of faith, lost and held. And there’s a murky morality that refuses to go for easy answers. All of the film’s characters are prisoners in some way, including Grace, who surrenders to prescription drugs to escape her sorrow.

It’s only when this edgy movie turns toward finally solving its mystery that it vaguely resembles “Seven” or “The Silence of the Lambs.” Yet if Aaron Guzikowski’s script uses genre blueprints for trickery’s sake, Villeneuve and the actors rise above.

Gyllenhaal, small and haunted, gives a performance full of twitches, his skin sallow, his eyes sunken. Jackman, big as an oak, makes Keller more powerless as his brutality increases. As in last year’s “Les Miserables,” he brings a human face to fear and ferocity

Dano, Bello, Howard, Davis and Leo — the last nearly unrecognizable — are equally strong. Villeneuve, whose last film was the Oscar-nominated “Incendies,” uses them all perfectly, and “Prisoners” works best when it’s not what you thought it was going to be. But even on familiar ground, it’s hard to let go of.