‘Prisoner’s Daughter’: Toronto Review

Dir: Catherine Hardwicke. US. 2022. 100 mins.

Following a terminal cancer diagnosis, a prisoner is granted a compassionate release: an opportunity to spend his final few weeks under house arrest with his loved ones. Except there is very little love lost between Maxine (Kate Beckinsale) and her estranged ex-con father Max (Brian Cox). It’s only her parlous financial state which persuades her to let him stay in her down-at-heel house in a Las Vegas suburb, just as long as he pays rent and keeps his true identity from her 12-year-old son Ezra (Christopher Convery). There are very few surprises in this formulaic domestic drama, but there are pleasures to be had in watching Cox in grizzled bad ass pensioner mode, slapping some sense into various callow young upstarts. The always charismatic Beckinsale is also strong, her performance a feisty foil for Cox’s pugnacious presence.

Hardwicke struggles to recapture the verve and energy of her earlier work

The follow up to her remake of the Mexican crime picture Miss Bala sees Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke struggling to recapture the verve and energy of earlier work, specifically her debut Thirteen. But Prisoner’s Daughter is solid, watchable stuff which could find a home at further festivals. Succession star Cox will likely prove to be a selling point for the film, which could connect with streaming platform audiences.

Maxine is broke. She can’t afford the seizure medication for her epileptic son – she can hardly afford breakfast cereal. Her shifts at a local restaurant and night work backstage at a Vegas variety show barely make a dent in the debts accrued by her bad life choices. The most notable of these was her marriage to Tyler (Tyson Ritter), a deadbeat drug addict musician who lives in what he describes as an artists-co-op community, but what in fact looks more like an abandoned car park full of strung-out losers. Tyler is the main reason for Maxine’s debts; he is also Ezra’s father. But while he is still using, she has cut off contact between them. Starved of a male role models, Ezra idolises his father, and, once Max arrives, latches onto the elderly man who, he is told, is an “uncle”.

The film carves its redemption arc using the closest tools to hand. Thus Max, a former boxer, coaches Ezra on how to deal with the bullies who torment him on a daily basis (with judicious violence). And when Tyler rolls into Ezra’s birthday party with pin eyes and a keg of beer, Max shows him what’s what (more judicious violence). For a man who is dying of pancreatic cancer, Max still has a mean right hook.

It’s not a poorly-made film by any means. Hardwick evocatively captures the splinters of a complicated love between tough father and tougher daughter, and the film’s sense of place is vividly captured: the down-at-heel fringes of Vegas, where the losers in this city built on luck wash up. But there is no escaping the fact that Prisoner’s Daughter is rather predictable. Emotional investment in the story is rather undermined by the fact that we know exactly where the story is going from the moment that Max arrives at Maxine’s home, with a suitcase full of regrets and a tag on his ankle.