Film Review | A Prophet

Directed By Jacques Audiard

150 min.

It takes considerable skill to seamlessly transform the lead character in your film from a naive reprobate to a powerful crime boss, all in 150 minutes and without a brief skip in plot or tempo. But that’s exactly what writer and director Jacques Audiard (of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Sur Mes Levres fame) has achieved in his hard-hitting, prisoner-gangster movie A Prophet.

Audiard guides unknown actor Tahar Rahim through playing the lead role of a young French Arab, Malik El Djebena, who gets sent to jail for six years for a crime he didn’t commit. Inside, Malik is distraught, confused, lonely and scared, and is quickly spotted and taken advantage of by the Corsican gang boss Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup) as someone who can do his dirty work.

Malik is reluctant, especially when he’s told his first job is to kill someone. But he soon realises the Corsicans run the prison, guards included, and that doing them a favour or two will ensure certain luxuries like a big room with a TV, endless cigarettes and permission to have working girls visit him.

Using his growing status, Malik makes sure he’s on reasonable terms with powerful people in every part of the prison, not just the Corsicans. He guarantees that by the time he’s granted the odd day release for good behaviour towards the end of his sentence, he can entertain himself on the outside by arranging elaborate drug-smuggling operations, collecting dead bodies and wiping out mafia bosses.

Contacts are made, deals are done, scores are settled and the seeds from which a criminal empire can grow are sewn. As audacious and fantastical as Malik’s story sounds, it’s powerfully and unpretentiously told. A Prophet is a high-tempo, sometimes brutal but always authentic movie about the coming of age of a young man in the world of crime, very reminiscent indeed of the rise of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

9 out of 10

Tom Howard