Jacques Audiards knack with the crime film has been growing steadily in force since the his debut. Each film tightening, focusing, yet becoming more and more subtly complex.

When he decided to follow up the brilliant Hitchcock influenced Read My Lips, with a remake of James Toback’s little seen Fingers, he garnered his first world wide hit. The Beat My Heart Skipped showed a knack for character amongst the “cool” that few directors can balance so well.

A Prophet, Audiard’s follow up to new offering takes the now somewhat cliche ridden aspects of crime genre films and crushes them into dust. These tales which we all know in one way or another, including the mob boss and his sidekicks, initiation rituals, double crossing and family hits are filtered carefully through the micro society of the prison system with fierce results.

We join a young Muslim man Malik el Djebena (an intense Tahar Rahim) on his way to a six year jail term for a  crime which will remain unknown. We settle into prison with him in a familiar opening sequence but the tension that Audiard builds is quite incredible, every frame is loaded with menace. From the whirring sewing machine that Malik works on during shop time to that first lonely walk in the prison yard. The atmosphere builds unbearably and it becomes apparent very quickly that his heads down loner approach isn’t going to fair well on the inside.

When veteran prisoner and Corsican mob boss Cesar (A beast in an old man’s suit; Niels Arestrup) eyes Malik to kill an in transit inmate who will testify against some of his friends on the outside, our “hero” suddenly finds himself between a rock and a hard place.  It’s kill or be killed and in return for his deed Cesar will protect Malik in the clink. It’s only after the harrowing and brutal murder (a scene destined to be a classic) that you can relax a little and Audiard settles A Prophet into a different place.

As Malik’s confidence grows inside the prison so does the tale’s scope, encompassing education and redemption. It’s a series of leave days from the prison that turns A Prophet on its head. Though my first doubts about the film began to surface at the point in which we are on the outside the jail, Audiard’s masterful handling of the plotting that develops in the real world only helps to strengthen it.

Now running both against and with Ceasar on the  inside and on the streets the story deepens so quickly and effortlessly. It’s development as a saga is beautiful to watch and is certainly one  in which a viewer’s affection for an totally unlikeable person is tested the most extreme and original ways.

Tahar Rahim’s performance is wonderful, playing the lead with a solemn uncertainty and yet also with a dumb childish swagger. A lost little boy in the films first third before growing into a confident and intelligent wise guy towards it’s conclusion. He cements a definite and powerful breakthrough role. Audiard regular Niels Arestrup plays Ceasar brilliantly; a fearsome Svengali to begin, yet towards the films end, somehow, an incredibly sad one.
Although punctuated with definite moments of style (Bold captions over slow motion shots mark Character’s names and loose chapters within the film) thankfully they only exist to help get a grip on a faint outline of the complex story threads and multiple relationships that sit atop.

Surprisingly, Audiard also uses a ghost of Reyeb, the man Malik killed for Ceasar, to good effect. It’s not a scenario I’m a fan of, however, apart from providing some genuinely creepy moments, his presence is used mainly as a reminder of Malik’s sin, to hound and educate only to be eventually accepted over the film’s course as he becomes more and more en-raveled in the crime world.

The camera work and pacing are what we have come to expect from Audiard and even after the brilliant Read My Lips and former career best The Beat My Heart Skipped, A Prophet puts the French film maker top of his class. The intense and almost documentarian way A Prophet depicts the prison world is flawless. There is a strange ultra realistic sense when within the four walls, a feeling of truth and sick nervousness not unlike the real life asylum used in Milos Foreman’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Put simply, A Prophet is one of the best mob (or prison films; take your pick) in recent memory and a piece of cinema that any real fan of it’s visceral power should see.

Essential.