French filmmaker Jacques Audiard has followed 2005’s The Beat that My Heart Skipped with an engrossing, terrifying prison drama about Malik, a young French-Arab convict who enters a tough French jail and finds himself with even less freedom than he bargained for. In a performance from newcomer Tahar Rahim that recalls the brooding charisma of Romain Duris in Audiard’s last film, Malik finds himself on the verge of extinction but gradually wins himself the education he needs to survive – and maybe even triumph – in this most brutal of worlds. It’s a closed society which Audiard portrays in unflinching realist terms, indulging with impressive detail in the numbing rituals and rhythms of life in a high-security modern jail.

Malik enters prison a keep-your-head-down, solitary sort and leaves several years later an entirely changed character: it’s the in-between that Audiard explores. An older lag, César Luciani (Niels Arastrup) – a porcine member of the Corsican mafia who is always surrounded by lackeys in the prison yard and who pays off prison guards left, right and centre – forcibly takes Malik under his wing and blackmails him into killing another prisoner. This act, which is presented with all the horror of the actual death without ignoring exactly what it means for Malik’s destiny, ensures that the young prisoner enters a criminal servitude from which he can’t escape. This prison is feudal and Malik is now César’s vassal. When Malik tries to appeal to the authorities, his ‘betrayal’ immediately comes to light and the vice is only tightened further on his existence.

If some of the script verges on the generic as the plot becomes more and more wild, Audiard’s direction and unflagging concern for his central character ensure that A Prophet is never less than believable, thoughtful and, although very uncomfortable at points, incredibly entertaining. Audiard handles a complex story with such confidence and precision that it doesn’t matter that the full ins and outs of the story are sometimes hard to follow. Much of the film runs on a sense of sheer dread as Malik, merely to keep on living, walks an ever-lengthening tightrope. The sense of location in the prison, which one assumes is a real jail, is very strong.

The film’s greatest success, though, is that while many of its surface qualities – the mafia, the drug deals, the guns, the car crashes, the hitmen – are straight out of the movies, we never for a second feel that Audiard has taken his eye off the real world and the experience of his main character. If there’s one scene that reflects that approach the most is when Malik takes a plane for the first time: not only does he open his mouth and stick out his tongue when going through security, as he does for his prison guards, but when the food trolley comes round the plane, he grabs several croissants and struggles to release the meal tray. It’s details like these keep the busy story of A Prophet rooted in reality.

Dave Calhoun 

From Time Out London

Dir Jacques Audiard, Category III, 154 mins, opens Thursday 28