Stars: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup
Running time: 155 mins
Rating: ★★★★

FRENCH-Arab Malik (Tahar Rahim) gets six years for his part in a cop-killing crime and viewers get a 155-minute stretch behind bars in this prison drama from Jacques Audiard, who made The Beat That Skipped My Heart.

Malik is 19, can’t read or write.

But the classes he attends in prison are only part of his education inside that shows there is no honour among thieves.

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He discovers that the prisoners are divided, by race and religion, into gangs and that the place isn’t ruled by the warders but the inmates themselves.

Malik is recruited by Corsican crime boss Cesar (Niels Arestrup, looking alarmingly like chef Anthony Worrall Thompson) for a killing. He’s told to kill a grass who’s being kept in prison before testifying at a trial. He’s trained to do it, learning how to hide a razor blade in his mouth for the upclose and unpleasant task.

That’s the first of several violent and bloody sequences as Malik works him way up the ladder in prison until he’s Cesar’s right hand man, using his day passes to carry on with the crime boss’s dirty business outside prison.

The ghost of his first victim appears from time to time to remind him what he’s got himself into and there’s some stuff with a deer to justify the prophet in the title. Despite its length, A Prophet is a riveting and gripping drama, a worthy addition to the movie prison genre with a great central performance by Rahim, totally convincing as the naive teenager who develops into a master criminal.