A Prayer Before Dawn

Brutal true-life prison drama Dir: Jean-stéphane Sauvaire 1hr 52mins (18)

Prison dramas “don’t come any more bruising” than A Prayer Before Dawn, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. It’s a true-life tale set in the brutal Thai jail known as the Bangkok Hilton, where Liverpudlian boxer and addict Billy Moore (played by Peaky Blinders actor Joe Cole) served three years for gun offences. His days are filled with beatings, punitive gang rapes and taking heroin procured from corrupt guards. To make his life in jail more bearable, Billy resolves to use his boxing skills to compete and win privileges, and the lip-splitting, bone-cracking Muay Thai fight sequences make for “tough viewing”, said Dan Jolin in Time Out. Heaven knows how tough it must have been for Cole to enact them. His performance is utterly committed and surprisingly vulnerable.

The thump of boxing gloves and the frequent use of handheld camera “makes for primal, first-person cinema”, said Simran Hans in The Observer. And French director Jean-stéphane Sauvaire has given the film added authenticity by employing non-professional Thai actors who are all ex-cons and boxing champions. Some of the violence struck me as gratuitous, even troublingly fetishistic, said Nigel Andrews in the FT. Yet the virtuosity of the film-making can’t be denied. For the viewer, this is “a remorseless, compelling sentence, just shy of two hours, with no remission for good behaviour”.