Classic Film Review #26: 12 Years a Slave

Available on Amazon Prime

Harrowing from the offset, Steve McQueen's macabre retelling of Solomon Northup's remarkable life story gets straight to the heart of the disease that plagued America throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, pulling no punches in its quest to fully demonstrate the inhumanity of slavery.  

Northup’s abduction and eventual escape is seen through the eyes of an outstanding Chiwetel Ejiofor, who delivers an empathic and arguably career-best performance. Along the way he is enslaved by various plantation owners, and John Ridley’s screenplay does a diligent job of demonstrating how such characters oscillate from a moral standpoint. Take, for example, Benedict Cumberbatch’s mild-but-complicit planter, who is (on face value at least) the polar opposite of the monstrous character played by Michael Fassbender, but nonetheless guilty of the same crime.

This is one of many clever touches that mean 12 Years a Slave, almost a decade on from its release, remains a vital film that simply cannot be ignored. One of McQueen’s greatest skills as a director is his ability to use the mise en scène of his pictures to communicate their meaning, and this is no more pronounced than the slow pan of a solitary bar of soap that succeeds one of this film's most excruciating moments.

Powered by outstanding turns from Ejiofor and Lupita Nyongo'o, this is a devastating and vital piece of cinema that continues to offer a chilling and prescient history lesson to its viewers.