Prisoners: Why The Alternate Ending Wasn’t Right For The Film [MINI]

The alternate ending for Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners would have undermined the film’s “show, don’t tell” style that defined the mystery thriller.

Director Denis Villeneuve filmed two endings for his 2013 thriller Prisoners—however, the alternate conclusion would have undermined the film’s core identity. Prisoners‘ twisting narrative follows Hugh Jackman’s Keller Dover and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki. After Dover’s daughter and her friend disappear in a small Pennsylvania town, the two investigate their whereabouts, each by their own means. When the police inquiry fails to yield conclusive results regarding the girls’ location and a potential kidnapper, Dover takes matters into his own hands by abducting a local unstable man, Alex Jones, who had parked his RV along the street where the girls were last seen. After torturing Alex in an attempt to coerce him to disclose his daughter’s location, Dover finally learns that Alex had been kidnapped himself and that the woman posing as his mother had held the girls hostage: first in a pit underneath her driveway and later locked them in a room in her house.

Prisoners opened to vast critical acclaim and is considered one of Denis Villeneuve’s best films. The movie’s attention to detail through expert cinematography earned it an Academy Award nomination. Prisoners‘ style of hiding its most shocking revelations in plain sight characterizes Villeneuve’s gripping mystery, which culminates in its conclusion.

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After its multiple plot twists, Prisoners ends with Dover confronting Alex’s “mother,” Holly, who, in turn, shoots him in the leg and forces him into the pit. After finding Alex where Dover held him in an abandoned building, Loki arrives at the Jones’ home to find Holly drugging Dover’s daughter. He fatally shoots Holly and rushes the girl to a hospital, but he knows nothing of Dover trapped in the pit hidden underneath an old car. The movie’s final scene takes place a day later and depicts Loki standing about as workers wrap up excavation work on Jones’ property. A faint whistling sound can be heard in the background—presumably from Dover in the pit. Loki shrugs it off, but as the noise persists, his facial expression indicates that he realizes something is off. The scene abruptly ends and the credits roll in an ambiguous conclusion that follows Villeneuve’s vision for his mystery tale. The film’s unused ending extends the scene, depicting Loki moving the car and rescuing Dover from the pit. The ending used in Prisoners‘ final cut was Villeneuve’s idea, as the alternate version was shot as merely a second option if the studio did not approve of the director’s vision. It’s easy to see how Villeneuve intended to leave his imprint on the movie by completing it in an unconventional way.

One of Prisoners‘ many strengths lies in its “show, don’t tell” method of storytelling, which is prevalent in the film’s final scene. The alternate ending with Loki rescuing Dover would have provided clear-cut answers for the audience, but it wouldn’t have fit as well with the Prisoners‘ established themes. For example, Villeneuve constructs the movie’s narrative in a way that frames Alex as guilty, despite him never admitting to kidnapping the girls or any definitive evidence to confirm him as the culprit. When Loki interrogates Alex, he frames his questions by suggesting a hypothetical series of events, planting the idea of what happened in viewers’ minds and allowing them to imagine it for themselves.

Accordingly, Villeneuve’s choice of an ambiguous ending for Prisoners allows the audience to determine how Loki rescued Dover and what their ensuing interaction entailed. The aforementioned instance of Villeneuve framing Alex’s guilt ends with the audience proven wrong, thus it begs the question of whether we can truly assume that the suggestion of Loki finding Dover goes exactly how the film appears to suggest. The essence of what makes Prisoners stand out derives from its expert method of developing its mystery by making the audience guess in all the wrong directions before revealing that the truth was right there all along. In that way, it can never entirely be concluded that Dover was rescued and reunited with his daughter.

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