Guzikowski's well-honed thriller occasionally idles under Villeneuve's dark character studies, but the director's powerfully imposed mood of dread elevates what might otherwise have been just a superior police procedural.

An increasingly sloppy thriller, filled with obvious clues, laughable red herrings, and halfhearted "shock" reveals, played at a snail's pace that lets far too much air into the narrative.

This film haunted me for days and weeks after seeing it, and the feeling still lingers.

Prisoners feels like an AMBER Alert writ large, using the queasy notion of missing children as a starting point for its exploration of several issues that aren’t black and white but instead rot away inside a malodorous area of gray.