A Prophet

This gritty prison drama is Oz minus the style and keeps guiding the audience where they least expected to go. And sometimes the last place they want to go.

Sentenced to six years in prison for assaulting a policeman, the uneducated nineteen-year-old Malik (Rahim) is thrown in with the big boys in one of France's toughest prisons. Although an 'Arab' by birth, Malik has no affiliation with his Muslim brothers and ingratiates himself with the other prison gang, the Corsican mafia, who are in the throws of a mini-war on the outside. To earn their protection, Malik is forced to kill a rat, drug dealer Reyeb (Yacoubi). Treated like a slave by his new protectors, Malik slowly learns the ropes and, tiptoeing between the racial tensions of the two gangs, begins to play both sides off each other. But Reyeb's killing weighs on Malik's mind and his ghost haunts his cell...

A Prophet is a blow-by-blow account of a young hood's rise through the ranks of the criminal underworld but don't go thinking Goodfellas, as this is more akin to Gomorrah. Small on style and big on reality, A Prophet steeps itself in coarse authenticity – there isn't a moment in this film that isn't believable (except maybe Malick's brief visions of the future). There are no exposition scenes, nothing is spelt out and Malik remains a mystery to the end. The audience isn't granted any information on Malik before his prison time and nor does Audiard (The Beat My Heart Skipped) want them to; to the director, who also co-wrote the script with Thomas Bidegain, that's irrelevant because prison is what makes him, turns him into what he is. It's a damning indictment of the prison system.

A Prophet can be accused of peaking too early, however. Over two-and-a-half hours long, the drama's highpoint is exposed in the first half hour with the deliberate planning of Reyeb's murder and doesn't have anything as strong in the locker until a beautifully executed hit much later. There's a lot of waiting around for something to happen but during it's in these quieter moments that newcomer Tahar Rahim really shines.