Prisoners is an intense, if sometimes disturbing, thriller that almost felt as long as the weeks spent searching for the missing girls in the movie.

Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a contractor that lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Grace (Maria Bello), teenage son Ralph (Dylan Minnette), and young daughter Anna (Erin Gerasimovtich). On their way between one house and another on Thanksgiving night, Anna and her best friend Joy (Kyla-Drew Simmons) are snatched away from their suburban neighborhood without a trace. This leaves the families of both girls fumbling desperately for any clues as to the whereabouts of their daughters.

Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is dispatched to the families with a spotless record of having solved every case he has been put on, but even he is groping in the dark to find the two girls before it is too late. There are several suspects, each with their own set of clues as to where the girls may be. Even with all the thrills of following Gyllenhaal’s character through his investigation, it can get to be a bit too involved to really keep the attention of the audience.

Prisoners brings about some very interesting points about how far a parent is willing to go to find their missing child, mostly through how we see Jackman devolve psychologically the longer his daughter is gone. The performances in this movie are great, as no one is cast in a purely heroic or villainous role. We get to see many different sides of the parents and suspects and the people on the case. At various points in the movie’s nearly two and a half hour running time, almost everyone has suspicion cast upon them for the terrible crime of kidnapping the girls.

Prisoners is not an easy watch and could have used some extra trimming to the script and the show itself, but overall it was a gripping thriller that ends on a not-quite-satisfying note, leaving the audience dizzy and wondering.