A brutal, balletic, poetic fight drama
A Prayer Before Dawn
18 cert, 114 min
Dir Jean-stéphane Sauvaire
Starring Joe Cole, Vithaya Pansringarm, Pornchanok Mabklang, Panya Yimmumphai
APrayer Before Dawn begins with the sight of flesh being rubbed down and greased up. The anointed body of some venerated princeling, or a joint of meat prepped for the spit? It’s something like both.
The muscle tone in question belongs to Billy Moore, the subject of this throat-grippingly intense martial arts prison thriller from Jean-stéphane Sauvaire. It is based on Moore’s 2014 memoir, in which the English Muay Thai boxer and drug dealer describes his three years in Bangkok’s notorious Klong Prem Central prison. But Sauvaire and his screenwriters, Jonathan Hirschbein and Nick Saltrese, have come up with something that looks and behaves almost nothing like a standard true-crime biopic.
Rose-tinted self-mythologisation is out: every scene unfolds in the heat of the split-second moment. And in place of the usual stand-offish machismo, there is an almost lyrical close-up fixation on male bodies and souls under stress. The premise has much in common with Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, about a young American incarcerated in Turkey. But the execution reminded me just as much of Beau Travail – Claire Denis’s mesmerising, dance-like retelling of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, set among a troupe of French Foreign Legionnaires in the African desert.
Vital to this is the lead performance by the Peaky Blinders actor Joe Cole, who plays Moore with a clamped- down, concentrated ferocity: the character is no roguish anti-hero, but a frantic knot of sinew, to whom we don’t relate so much as just cling on to for dear life.
For the most part, A Prayer Before Dawn has no truck with subtitles. Just like Moore, we’re kept culturally and linguistically dislocated from his hellish surrounds. Besides, you don’t have to understand the words to get the gist. Inmates are beaten and gangraped. Guards ply Moore with heroin, making every hit a favour to be repaid on demand. Respite comes in the svelte form of Fame (Pornchanok Mabklang), a transgender prisoner in jail for murdering her father, and who helps Moore acclimatise, not least by slipping him enough cigarettes to get a foothold in the prison economy.
His prowess in the ring helps too, and he eventually works his way into the institution’s boxing league. But even here, redemption is momentary, and bitterly hard-won. One particularly gruelling bout leaves his ear as pulpy and ragged as a half-chewed slice of tomato. Then, just when you think you have no more winces left, in comes the doctor with his needle and thread.
But there is also beauty here – in the balletic movements of the boxing bouts and drills, the intricately tattooed bodies of the Thai inmates, even in the calm, consoling way they hold Moore still when the time comes for his own hide to be etched. Sauvaire’s film is as tough as they come, and relentless in a way that will try some viewers’ patience and test others’ stomachs. But behind the mayhem, it has poetry in its blood.