Jacques Audiard’s prison drama is gripping, brutal and unusually attentive to how power works. Tahar Rahim makes Malik’s education convincing, even when the plotting becomes a little too tidy.
Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is a gripping prison drama that earns most of its 155 minutes. The young French-Arab inmate Malik El Djebena, played by Tahar Rahim, arrives as an outsider in a hierarchy he has to learn quickly. Audiard takes his education in organised crime seriously, giving the business of alliances as much attention as the violence. We understand the attraction of becoming competent at something when incompetence is dangerous. The film makes that an uncomfortable feeling to have about a criminal’s progress.
Rahim is the chief reason it works. He makes Malik’s growing resourcefulness believable without asking us to mistake survival for innocence. The cunning feels acquired under pressure, and there is enough vulnerability in the performance to keep us aware of what makes that pressure effective. We become interested in how Malik reads the people around him, which helps us follow the shifting allegiances. Niels Arestrup is forceful as César Luciani, but Rahim remains the person we watch most closely.
Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography gives the confinement an unpleasant immediacy, while Michel Barthélémy’s production design makes the prison convincing as a place where people have to live. The physical surroundings matter because this is a story about who can control them. We were horrified by the close-quarters violence: there is too little room for the distance that usually makes screen brutality bearable. Audiard makes us feel the difficulty and terror of it. The attention to prison life keeps that violence from becoming an occasional attraction between stretches of plot.
Juliette Welfling’s editing is crucial to keeping the complicated allegiances legible. We have to follow Malik’s changing understanding of the prison as well as the people within it, and the film rarely lets that work become homework. Its patience is useful. The accumulation of institutional detail gives the criminal politics weight, so a change in someone’s position can hold our attention without another violent encounter. For a long crime film, it has a firm sense of what deserves our time.
The screenplay, by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, is less persuasive when the workings of the plot become too easy to recognise. Some developments feel arranged to demonstrate Malik’s progress, and we begin to anticipate what a passage is doing before it has finished. That is a limited complaint, but it matters in a film otherwise so alert to awkward particulars. Rahim keeps the progression credible. We would have welcomed a little more of the messiness that makes the prison itself convincing.
The poetic passages are also uneven. Their presence makes sense: relentless realism can become a habit as limiting as any other, and Audiard wants access to more than the practical facts of Malik’s situation. Alexandre Desplat’s score contributes to their heightened mood, which we find less compelling than the tension generated by the actors. The film is already rich in feeling. It does not always need the extra emphasis.
Those reservations do not diminish the hold of the central performance or the care taken over this criminal education. Prison dramas often depend on our wanting someone to get out; here we are kept busy worrying about what Malik is learning inside. The familiar gangster story remains recognisable, but Audiard gives the daily negotiation of power enough detail to make it worth following again. See it for Rahim, and be prepared for violence that gives us no comfortable place to watch from.
