With the Oscars little over a month away, pundits are eagerly staking their bets for the Best Foreign Film gong, a famously divisive category that often results in left-field winners (such as last year’s Departures over the excellent Waltz with Bashir) due to odd voting regulations and other technicalities. However, the race this year is clearly cut between two contenders – Michael Haneke’s Golden Globe winner The White Ribbon, and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. 

A Prophet runs in at 150 minutes, but it isn’t a film to mess around; we are thrown straight into an impressionistic, perhaps even Neo-realist tale of a young French Arab, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), who has been sentenced to six years in prison for assaulting a police officer. Our first glimpses of Malik are of him being stripped naked and searched before being processed, and much like 2008’s gritty-but-underwhelming Gomorra, this is an intensely probing work of social realism, despite its flaws. Malik claims that he is innocent, but this isn’t The Shawshank Redemption; there is little whimsy or true camaraderie throughout, nor are there any Hallmark-style truisms. Malik is isolated and alone within a system that perpetuates violence in the same sorts of cycles that it intends to prevent.

It isn’t long before Malik is approached by the leader of the Corsican gang, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), who ropes him into promising to murder a fellow inmate, a Muslim named Reyeb. Before the grisly event even takes place (which features one of the most nauseatingly violent throat-cuts you’ll see in a while), Audiard doesn’t allow us to miss a beat; every little nuance and awkward moment is documented, such as when Malik attempts to find a way to hide the offending razor blade in his mouth, cutting himself in the process.

As Malik performs more jobs for César, he gains more power, and yes, it is at its heart a Goodfellas-esque story of ascension, but Audiard evidently also has wider concerns about the state of his country. In one particularly telling moment, Malik’s brother, Ryad, gets a job at a telemarketing firm, but is ordered to refer to himself as the traditional French handle of Jean-Pierre when speaking to customers. Meanwhile, Malik is thought of by the Corsican gang as a “dirty Arab”, while the Arabs chide him for being a Corsican; he is uniquely without any sense of place, as has been true since he was abandoned by his parents as a baby. Like Tyler Durden would say, he’s that awkward middle child of history.

Malik’s discontent is further compounded by his unerring unease over murdering Reyeb, whose likeness haunts him for most of the film, affording Audiard the opportunity to shoot some truly gorgeous surreal imagery, such as when Reyeb balances a flame on his finger and blows it out. Audiard does well not to lose these moments in a narrative that has a grand, sweeping scope, depicting a year of Malik’s life in the prison within the film’s first half hour.

The middle does, however, sag somewhat, as Malik’s “good behaviour” in the prison is rewarded with some leave time, causing the story to shift outside of the prison, where he performs jobs for the Corsicans on the sly, earning extra money for himself. Though somewhat languished by this point, it does also allow a unique kind of rise-to-power story, where Malik’s work allows him to buy DVD players, conjugal visits with prostitutes, and myriad other luxuries for himself in prison, demonstrating that whether you’re inside the slammer or out of it, the social structure is much the same.  

While the second half focuses less on characterisation and more on bigger ideas, this does allow a greater glimpse into prison politics, of how the conflicting interests of the Arabs and Corsicans are balanced administratively. Still, for the most part, it is a lot more testing, mixing some incongruent surreal imagery, such as a flying deer, with more generic elements we’ve seen many times before. However, Audiard’s assured direction and Rahim’s impressive performance lead this to the finish line with its head held high. 

Though it doesn’t totally live up to the promise of its exceptional first half, A Prophet is a fine prison drama that melds grimy authenticity and well-developed characters with robust performances and stellar direction.