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Prisoners shows Hugh Jackman like most people have never seen him. He plays Keller Dover, a desperate father who snaps when his daughter goes missing. But unlike most of his other films, here he does not play the calm, composed hero people are used to. Instead, he’s someone who gets driven to the edge and pushed beyond reason.
Prisoners, directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Aaron Guzikowski, tells the story of two girls who vanish one cold Thanksgiving day. Keller’s daughter and the daughter of his friends, Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy Birch, are gone, and they are last seen near a creepy old RV. The driver is a young man named Alex Jones, but there’s no evidence to hold him.
As a result, police let him go and that’s when Keller takes matters into his own hands. He kidnaps Alex and holds him in an abandoned building. Now, what follows is not a thriller in the usual sense. It becomes more personal for the distraught father and disturbing for the viewers who watch the ordeal unravel in front of their eyes.
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Keller tortures the man he believes knows something, and Franklin watches but doesn’t stop him. It is a mix of emotions, consisting of guilt and fear, which they all build into something hard to look away from.
In the movie, the bathroom scene is the peak of it all. Keller loses it completely while holding a hammer just inches from Alex’s hand, threatening to smash it. He beats the truth out of the kid, or at least tries to. That’s where one of the most intense scenes in the film comes in. Jackman grabs a hammer, shoves it in front of Alex’s face, and threatens to use it. He doesn’t hit Alex, but he demolishes the sink in the bathroom, shouting over and over.
The explosion of anger isn’t scripted in detail, it was mostly improvised. Apparently Villeneuve pushed Jackman hard, way too hard, on this scene. They shot the scene for hours, and when Jackman thought he had delivered the right level of fury, Villeneuve quietly told him it wasn’t enough.
In a 2022 interview with Sirius XM, Jackman revealed, “We’d done this take, and deep down I was like, ‘Yeah, we crushed it, that was it.’ And I remember Denis coming over and [he says], ‘I need to talk to you… I need you to go there.’ I said, ‘That wasn’t there?’ He goes, ‘No, that was not there […] I really need you to go there.’”
The Wolverine star, drained and unsure of how to go deeper, somehow found another gear. When the camera rolled again, he fully let go. What followed afterwards stunned everyone. Terrence Howard flinched and Paul Dano dropped to the floor in fear as he was not expecting the hammer to slam into the wall that hard, that close.
One can see Jackman burning out in front of the camera, and honestly, that makes the scene work. It is not the violence, but the helplessness underneath it that Keller can’t control. He knows he is falling apart, but he is not even sure if hurting this man will help. However, he does it anyway, because he doesn’t know what else to do.
Prisoners is available to watch on Prime Video in the US.
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