The general premise is established within the first fifteen minutes: Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arrives at prison to serve six years for a crime never referenced in the film and to which Malik, at least at one point, claims innocence. He arrives without connections, family, or any semblance of a past life beyond the cuts and scars on his body. Locked away, he quickly finds himself a lone target for hardened cri minals.

Meanwhile, the rivalry between Corsican and Muslim inmates escalates as a new Arab prisoner is housed in the Italian block. The Corsican boss, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), has been ordered to have this new prisoner killed before he can testify against the mob leaders on the outside. Malik is quickly told that he will be the one to do the job. Malik is an Arab, and can gain the trust of the Muslims easily. If he does not kill the new prisoner, the Italians will kill him in return.

This all happens within the first fifteen minutes, and is quite easy to follow. Malik shows some hesitation, but by minute twenty, begins to carry out the assignment. It’s an awkward, bloody murder and Malik is consequently haunted (literally and figuratively) by his actions.

The next two hours of the film charts Malik’s continual integration into the politics of prison life. He works first as a grunt for the Italians, learning to read and gaining friends, and eventually becomes quite proficient at a spectrum of crimes, from dealing drugs to ritualistic killings, and thrives by criminal activity.

The script might easily have been adapted into a miniseries, an episode for each of the six years of Malik’s imprisonment perhaps. The episodic structure of the film has a string of events which could have easily been shuffled, deleted, or combined with little effect on the end result. The events held little importance beyond showing Malik’s gradual ascension into criminal competency. There was no “big score” or rite of passage, and some of the side plots, like Malik’s visit to a friend with testicular cancer, seemed completely unnecessary.

Malik’s character is a blank one. It is only through Tahar Rahim’s shy but forceful presentation of the character that we care about Malik at all. As the film progresses, we begin to wonder more and more just how innocent Malik was to begin with, and it becomes more of a possibility that he projects inexperience as a way to remove the threat of stronger motivations.

Rahim’s performance is perfectly counterbalanced by the confident and established Niels Arestrup as César Luciani. Luciani is the king of the penitentiary, and the position Rahim must overtake if he is to survive. Luciani knows this, and gives continual reminders to Malik to keep him in place (reminders such as trying to jab out his eye with a metal spoon, just to show he still can). But, as viewers, we know that even if Malik replaces Luciani, eventually a new, younger inmate will desire to take his place as well. Malik is called a prophet for his seemingly supernatural predictions and insights, but he seems unable to escape his own fate as the next Luciani, a sad old man living in prison, fighting for what little power he still has, knowing that with the lapse of power comes death and betrayal.

Jacques Auriard increases the feeling of grittiness by using hand-held cameras and seemingly natural light. This does improve upon the reality of what is an archetypal plot, movie-ish to its core in its Godfather and Scorsese undertones. The cinematography suffers somewhat from this insistence on grittiness, with only a few shots standing out as aesthetically pleasing. Auriard also uses several stylistic flourishes, more to add flavor than enhance the storytelling. We get post-processed vignetting (Image 11), post-processed slow motion, and several other effects that seem mostly added after-the-fact. These effects feel gimmicky, and pale in comparison to the planned manipulations, like the in-camera slow motion in a climatic scene. (Image 15)

The non-diagetic music and score clashed with the realism of the visual style. The score itself by Alexandre Desplat (the composer for such other recent scores as The Ghost Writer) is a solid piece of work, but it’s unnecessary. Other more showy uses of music are distracting, like a montage set to Turner Cody’s “Corner of My Room.” Director Auriard also adds in occasional text-on-screen introductions to characters, but it’s quite random and inconsistent. (Image 4)

Auriard’s voice is somewhere between the Dardenne Brothers and an early 2000s Lars von Trier, but he lacks the former’s emotional impact and the latter’s cinematic subversions. With A Prophet, he’s been labeled a French Scorsese, but he lacks Scorsese’s strict visual formalism, and the reference has more relevance to plot than style. As for the effects, several were obviously CGI, which was distracting in crucial scenes of a realistic drama.