A PROPHET is another superbly compelling and coolly confident crime thriller from Jacques Audiard, the French director of THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, which was so well received back in 2005. Already a festival favourite, (it won the Grand Prix at Cannes and Best Film at London Film Festival), A PROPHET is destined to be another hit with international audiences, refreshing the well worn prison genre with an impressive cinematic fluidity, managing to be many things all at once: tough and tender, epic and understated, thrilling and reflective, and at times unbearably tense.

The film follows Malik, an illiterate and niave nineteen year old Muslim, beginning a six year sentence in a grimly oppressive French prison, where the threat of violence hangs heavy in the air, clinging to the walls like a queasy damp. His fear and trepidation are tangible and it takes no time at all for this vulnerability to be sniffed out by the hardened and predatory inmates. On his first day in the yard he is beaten and robbed of his shoes, then falls into the view of a much more dangerous influence - Cesar, the Corsican mobster who runs the prison and has the guards in his pocket. Cesar gives Malik a terrible dilemma: he must kill an inmate – a fellow Muslim who is to testify against associates on the outside – or be killed himself by Cesar’s thugs. Faced with the impossible choice between damnation and survival, Malik embarks on a Faustian pact that will see him transform himself - through sheer force of will – from a terrified, uneducated and friendless patsy to the self determined and ruthless crime lord that is released from prison at the films close.

Audiard coaxes remarkable performances from his two leads, unearthing a gem in newcomer Tahar Rahim, in what is undoubtedly a star-making debut. As Malik, Rahim is in just about every shot of the film and performs an enormously subtle transformation which is never anything but completely compelling. The way the character’s body language, confidence and intelligence is honed with each careful and perilous step up the criminal hierarchy is almost invisible, but cumulatively emphatic, especially in the final, triumphant scene. And as Cesar, Niels Aestrup brings a fascinating complexity to his world-weary mob boss. A cruel and calculating bully, layers of vulnerability are gradually revealed as his thuggish bodyguards are released or repatriated, leaving him exposed and fearful of the turning tide within the prison’s walls. He is an uneasy quasi-father figure to the ever-watchful Malik, who he unwittingly nurtures to be his nemesis.

Audiard’s directorial style has a thrillingly muscular realism to it, while somehow absorbing an intriguing philosophical, even supernatural, atmosphere that lifts the film to the realms of the truly memorable. And with Malik’s morally ambiguous journey, Audiard presents an unorthodox and uncomfortable truth: if you are prepared to do what it takes, prison can offer you the freedom to reinvent yourself.