Prisoners, directed by Canadian Denis Villenueve, is one of the more under-appreciated films of 2013. A thriller with outstanding complexity and more twists and turns than one of its elaborate mazes, it packs quite a punch. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly suggest that you should, but meanwhile skip to the next section because this is obviously going to be very spoilery. Bob Taylor is the suspect played by the admittedly creepy-looking David Dastmalchian, a man who has the abducted children's clothing in his house along with several snakes in lockboxes. But it turns out that Taylor isn't the abductor after all the real criminal is the seemingly innocuous Holly Jones, played by Melissa Leo. But before that information can be parsed through, as the main suspect in the case Taylor is taken in for questioning. Under some unorthodox, beating-havy interrogation techniques from Detective Loki, Bob manages to steal a policeman's gun and shoot himself with it. His death is immediately shocking, but in the context of the movie up to that point it isn't entirely tragic. He still seems to be at least complicit in the crimes. But later it is revealed by a profiler that Taylor was actually another victim of the Jones family of abductors, and therefore his obsession with the mazes and inability to move beyond the suffering of his youth makes his death particularly tragic.
Bryan Hickman is a WhatCulture contributor residing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Bryan's passions include film, television, basketball, and writing about himself in the third person.
