Where James Toback’s 1978 drama Fingers was the inspiration for Jacques Audiard’s celebrated 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, for the pulsating, brutal and achingly tense prison drama A Prophet the French director has mined the likes of Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jules Dassin and Jean-Pierre Melville to create a instant genre classic and an audacious piece of cinematic story telling. It is the standout film of the last 12 months, quite possibly of the 12 to come, and places Audiard firmly in the pantheon of great European filmmakers. Indeed, there must be a claim that over the course of a career in which he has directed a comparatively bashful five films in 16 years (including, A Self Made Hero, Read My Lips and The Beat…), Audiard has assembled a beautifully refined collection of work to rival, or better, the notional cream of the cinematic world. In an industry that celebrates overindulgence and lavishes praise on creative gluttony, Audiard, much like that other inspired recluse Terence Malick, proves that sometimes less is almost certainly more.

In A Prophet he has created a complex but hugely rewarding film about growth and survival. It is the story of an illiterate young inmate rising through the ranks of the prison criminal classes, from nervous greenhorn to formidable player. It tells of his transformation, his manipulation and his shifting status under the (precarious) guidance of the prison kingpin until, armed with a new cunning and swagger, he ruthlessly and decisively acts to usurp his tutors-in-violence. It is moving, vicious, grimly cynical and entirely dispassionate, claustrophobic and elaborately constructed. It is also utterly absorbing.

The film’s star, Tahar Ramin, gives a beautifully nuanced performance as the enigmatic Malik, the cornered, wide-eyed innocent cast adrift into the fierce bear pit of blood-soaked prison hierarchies who grows in confidence, and influence, as he slowly unpicks the complex and nefarious web of tribal codes that underpin criminal life. While Niels Arestrup, as the toxic Corsican overlord, Cesar, who rules obdurately over the fate of others and commands Malik’s allegiance by ordering him to murder a fellow Arab inmate, is fearsome and convincing. The sequence in which Malik is trained and prepares for that assassination is one of the most tense and unsettling I have ever experienced and the murder itself, clumsily executed in cocktail of panic and naivety, is filmed with absolutely no concession to audience sensibilities. Cesar’s desperate decline, too, from tyrannical ogre to ineffectual bit-part player, coldly pushed aside in the unrelenting battle for a very tenuous kind of power, is perfectly played out.

Watching A Prophet I was reminded of another towering prison film of recent years, Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008); but where that film played out almost serenely, just below the surface of prison life, A Prophet mines a far deeper seam of realism, one submerged in the shadowless spaces. Audiard disentangles the labyrinthine, poisonous realities of state captivity without sentimentality for the protagonist and with a dramatic momentum that underscores the survival-at-any-costs mentality required to endure, from lights-up to lockdown. It is an inevitable and gelatinous mire into which Malik is pulled but from which he emerges formidably schooled in a unique strain Darwinian darkness. At 2h30m this is a long film, but it is impeccably paced to capture this conversion in all its callous glory.

A Prophet throws up many intriguing questions about ethnicity, post-colonialism, loyalty and (im)morality, but first and foremost it is a wickedly compelling film. Its power derives from the density of its plot – one that requires absolute surrender to its numerous, interwoven strands – its uncommon refusal to pass judgement on any of its players and, aesthetically, on the stark juxtaposition between bleak realism and heightened fantasy, and all that it implies within the context of the narrative. The result is a triumphant film that demands viewing, and reviewing, and one that confirms, along the work of Micheal Haneke, Claire Denis and Andrea Arnold among others, quite what a strong year it has been for European filmmaking.