Jacques Audiard

In A Prophet (2009), Malik enters prison as an outsider who has to learn how its hierarchy works. Tahar Rahim makes his growing competence convincing, and Audiard lets us understand its appeal without making the violence bearable. We were horrified by the close-quarters violence, because the cramped surroundings deny us any comfortable distance from its difficulty and terror. The alliances get as much attention as the brutality, so we understand what Malik is learning and why he needs to learn it.

After his directorial debut, See How They Fall (1994), the breakthrough was The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005). Its young man is torn between crime and classical piano, an early instance of Audiard’s interest in people trying to change. In Dheepan (2015), a Tamil refugee faces unfamiliar surroundings in France. The English-language The Sisters Brothers (2018) followed. By Emilia Pérez (2024), he was making a Spanish-language musical about a cartel boss.

A Prophet remains our starting point for his work, partly because its collaborators make the prison feel inhabited. Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography keeps confinement oppressively immediate, while Michel Barthélémy’s production design gives the inmates somewhere credible to live. The screenplay Audiard wrote with Thomas Bidegain is less sure when developments neatly advertise Malik’s progress. Alexandre Desplat’s score adds emphasis to poetic passages that are less persuasive than the actors.

Emilia Pérez shows how carelessly Audiard can handle the change that so often interests him. Its first hour is nervy and alive, and Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón keep it watchable afterwards. Yet the songs mostly fail, and the question of whether changing the body changes the person is raised and then abandoned. Once it settles into telenovela, the plot demands less thought than its subject deserves. For a first encounter with Audiard, choose A Prophet rather than the musical.