From Denmark rookies Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm comes R, a brutal prison drama about the moral and physical destruction of two inmates fresh off the street. “When you get imprisoned, you are reduced to a number, a letter, just another inmate,” write Noer and Lindholm in their directors’ statement. “But we did not want to do just another prison film. We wanted to set ourselves free of all clichés.”
Noer and Lindholm set out instead to capture the so-called reality of prison life, using a recently abandoned Danish prison as their set and stripping the violence and meagerness of life on the inside of all its cinematic glamour and excitement. R has none of the mob world intrigue of thrillers like Jacques Audiard’s 2010 stunner, A Prophet and none of the plaintive humanitarianism of classic prison flicks like Cool Hand Luke and The Shawshank Redemption. Instead, the new inmates are ground unmercifully through the mill of gang politics, finding solace only in the fragile traces of their lives on the outside: a penchant for cleanliness, a photo of a girlfriend, a furtive cigarette.
Even so, the prison drama has such an obvious template by now that R slips inevitably into the familiar. Rune (Pilou Asbæk), the eponymous hero, and Rashid (Dulfi Al-Jabouri), his friend and ally, experience a brief advancement in the hierarchical world of the prison when they discover a new way to transport drugs from one block to another. Soon, however, matters slip out of their hands and each struggles to deal with the violent backlash of their former colleagues. Even at the height of Rune and Rashid’s confidence, it’s obvious that they’re ripe for a fall: Noer and Lindholm imbue every scene with tremors of vulnerability, while Asbæk and Al-Jabouri play their roles with desperate timidity. They are victims from start to finish, and the film’s grisly outcome is only unpredictable in its extremity.
R is a chilling, visceral film, but it relies too heavily on images of pain, humiliation, and victimization to express the struggle of its protagonists. When Rune is detained on suspicion of beating up a fellow prisoner, for example, he’s stripped naked, physically intimidated, and verbally provoked into defending himself. The guards respond forcefully, pinning him against the ground with a knee in his back. Rune, bewildered and overwhelmed, proclaims his ignorance and innocence in confused denial. “I don’t know!” he shouts again and again. The scene evokes feelings of revulsion and even terror, but as the film continues, Rune’s fearful helplessness becomes a monotonous refrain. Neither the callousness of the guards nor the brutality of the inmates seems to carry any particular meaning for the characters or for the viewer. Prison is a bleak, soulless place. That’s just the way it is.
Noer and Lindholm tend to deal in pity and not empathy in part because we know so little about our protagonists and their persecutors. The film unfolds largely in silence and entirely within the confines of the prison. Insights into Rune’s personal life and character are few and undeveloped. From the very beginning, he is little more than a name and a face. This, to be sure, is part of the point: Rune has been dehumanized by prison. He has become “just another inmate.” But with no hints of what Rune might have been like before or after his jail sentence, R conveys its message all too well, for it’s hard to imagine him any other way.
