Screen Share | Of prison films and the fear of confinement

Screen Share | From prison dramas like Visaranai to survival films like 127 Hours and horror titles like From, cinema has artfully drawn upon the primal fear of being restrained to a claustrophobic setting

I feared that it would be a dingy underground room that would see me off in the end, until a few months ago, when I wandered astray on a bird-watching trail in Kerala under the scorching Malabar sun (a forest guard thought I was being overdramatic since I was only less than a kilometre off). Being restrained to a claustrophobic quadrant or a large but suffocating dome forms the rock bed of many anxieties. Films have artfully drawn upon this primal fear of humans.

This fear even lies at the foundation of state-sanctioned confines like prisons. Rebelling against oppression offers such catharsis that even a law-abiding citizen like yours truly imagines being Steve McQueen from The Great Escape. But that rose-tinted image of being a hero, or having beer with your squad on a prison rooftop, belies the dark reality of the prison system; as a friend reminds me, while “hope is a good thing and no good thing ever dies,” I certainly wouldn’t make it in prison. As Vetri Maaran shows in Visaranai, depravity runs deep in these corrupt, barbaric sanctuaries. Perhaps if things go south, I only hope to be someone resembling Divine G from Sing Sing, walking like poetry, talking Shakespeare, calling fellow men ‘beloved.’ Or pass with the spirit of Roberto Benigni in the Holocaust film Life Is Beautiful.

A grimmer idea is being lodged in special homes or asylums (like Sofia Falcone inThe Penguin), or unusual, unconventional prisons — like in the overtly fiendish Spanish drama The Platform, where prisoners lodged on multiple levels of a tower display the hells-bottom of greed. You’d feel new-found gratitude for life upon watching Yorgos Lanthimos’ nightmarish Dogtooth, in which three children are raised in a home prison unaware of the outside world.

If Rajkummar Rao’s ordeals in Trappedseem traumatic, 127 Hoursharrowingly rips the comfortable thought that we might be safe outside concrete and under the open skies; anxiety heightens when a rock climber’s arm gets stuck in a canyon, and you struggle to accept the only way out is voluntary amputation. Social dramas, like12 Years A Slave and Schindler’s List, become celluloid sculptures of humanity’s shady past from not more than 80 years ago.

A recent horror title that engrossingly captured the anxiety of confines is From, in which travellers get trapped in a village where the night lures out monsters. Like in that series, when more than one character is in the confines, dramatic interpersonal conflicts add to our worst fears over fellow humans. Imagine being the lead of 2022’s Fall and 2005’s The Descent; you are trapped with a friend who reveals she had slept with your late husband! Solo trips are popular for a reason; if only we had a friend like Siju from Manjummel Boys.

Many psychopath films make you wish a prison was better than being jailed in a dungeon; you only hope the captor is half as interesting as Hugh Grant in Hereticwho nabs two girls, questions their faith and the purpose of all existence (Unsure how he’d react when I tell him I am agnostic).

But as The Truman Show and Sigmund Freud peck at, civilisation is but a framework we build to imprison ourselves. It’s intriguing to wonder how even relationship dramas show emotional cages eliciting similar traumatic responses as physical cages. But when dystopian films paint the whole world as a prison, what hope do we have?