Today marks the cinema release of French crime epic A Prophet in Germany. The gripping thriller, for lack of a better word, by Jacques Audiard was nominated at the Oscars for Best Foreign Feature, and won the Grand Prix at the prestigious Cannes Festival last year, and deservedly so. A kind of upside down coming-of-age story, A Prophet follows Tahar Rahim in a mesmerizing debut performance as Malik, a delinquent and illiterate juvenile Arab sentenced to six years in prison, where he has to learn very fast to adapt to the rough ways of imprisonment as a question of survival, being caught between the Corsican mafia and the Arab community.
After getting a lot of international attention for his previous films such as The Beat that my Heart Skipped, Audiard has finetuned his craft of creating his own unique hybrid between genre movie, social documentary and French arthouse movie. A Prophet takes a close look at the world of the outcast, at racism and corruption, while never painting a black and white scenario. It’s immensely well done and just goes to show what a crime thriller could look like, if Hollywood only had the guts for it.
