'A Prophet' hauntingly captures a young man's life behind bars

In Jacques Audiard's haunting prison drama "A Prophet," we watch a young man transformed by life behind bars. He enters, a 19-year-old with a baby face and a thug's bravado, and submits to a search: arms spread, legs spread, tongue out. Later, we see him in an airport being searched at security, and automatically he sticks out his tongue for inspection; though still young, he's already acquired lifetime habits.

Malik (Tahar Rahim), who is of Arab descent, notes immediately the division of the prison, with two camps despising each other: the Arabs and the Corsicans. The leader of the Corsicans, Luciani (Niels Arestrup), struts the prison yard like a cat made lord of a feudal manor, and he wants Malik on his side, hoping the younger man can kill an Arab prisoner about to testify against the Corsican mafia. Wanting to side with the powerful, Malik complies, concealing a razor in his mouth and doing the job.

These are early scenes in the movie, and the rest of its leisurely running time follows the consequences of the act — this is a rare movie in which all actions have moral consequences. Malik, becoming entangled with the drug trade as he gets ever closer to the dangerous Luciani (he even secretly learns to speak Corsican), finds a way to survive in prison by making compromises that bring him more comfort and safety. But the ghost of the man he killed watches him in his cell at night, cigarette smoke pouring from his neck wound as he quietly observes what Malik has become.

Audiard ("The Beat That My Heart Skipped") employs a nervous, jittery camera to tell the story, and his use of light is often startling: On a brief leave, Malik stares at the stark sunlight as if it's something alien. We see the details of prison life — in France, it appears, prisoners get fresh baguettes with their meals, and the industrial sewing machines of the workroom screech like sirens — and watch Malik growing much older than his years. A shadow, as we're shown in the film's enigmatic final scene, will always follow him; blood-soaked hands, it turns out, can never become truly clean.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com