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English (SDH), Spanish, none

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• Trailer (2:23)

The film 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s antebellum Southern drama, sets a new standard in realistically depicting American slavery. With slavery at the heart of the paradox – the United States’ existence was founded on the principle of liberty – a mainstream film that depicts that bleak part of history is exceptional.

For that reason alone, 12 Years A Slave is probably the film event of the year, but worthiness in itself can be deadly – even if it does win Academy Awards. Fortunately, 12 Years a Slave is also exceptional as a film. Far from the push-button catharsis offered by most Hollywood redemption tales, the work is sober and deliberate, a mix of visceral intensity and artful design.

Based on the 19th-century memoir of Solomon Northup (adapted here by screenwriter John Ridley), 12 Years a Slave follows the tribulations of an educated carpenter, musician and family man from New York state who, in 1841, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south – a shockingly common phenomenon. Stripped of his past, his identity and even (in the eyes of the law) his humanity, the renamed "Platt" becomes the property of plantation owner Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose comparatively benign and sympathetic demeanour belies his slaver status. But after incurring the ire of sadistic farmhand Tibeats (Paul Dano), "Platt" is sold down the river to Epps (Michael Fassbender), a broiling cauldron of psychotic rage whose desire for slave girl Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) appears to be pushing him ever further into an abyss of uncontrollable cruelty.

Despite McQueen's repeated assertion that he has no distinct "style" (the functional marriage of form and content is everything), critics have identified recurring tropes in his feature films, such as the audaciously lengthy single takes of Hunger (the priest/prisoner interview) and Shame (Sissy's song), which appear talismanic. At a deeper level, there's a consistent interest in the punishment of the flesh that dates back to his early moving-picture projects (the wrestling/teasing of Bear) and underwrites each of his three feature films, in which bodies are variously starved, entangled and beaten in obliterating fashion. The stench of hanging and flogging that drifts in the steamy Louisiana air of 12 Years a Slave makes watching occasionally unbearable – I looked away more than once; not a criticism (we are worlds away from the exploitational tones of Django Unchained), more an acknowledgement of the film's awful raw power. One sequence in which Northup is strung up like some strange fruit from a tree while life on the plantation ambles on around him achieves a surreal intensity that recalls the haunting poetry of Terrence Malick's existential war movie The Thin Red Line.

Gary Tooze

February 26th, 2013