Papillon review: This claustrophobic remake of a classic prison drama has nothing new to say

Dir: Michael Noer. Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Rami Malek, Tommy Flanagan, Eve Hewson, Roland Møller, Nina Senicar, Michael Socha. Cert 15, 130 mins.

It’s hard not to feel a sense of cabin fever while sitting through Papillon. The hero spends almost the entire movie in captivity, and large parts of it in solitary confinement. His spirit doesn’t break. But whether taken as a study in human resilience, as an oblique love story, or as an indictment of the French penal system, this drama is claustrophobic and oppressive.

This Papillon doesn’t just invoke memories of the 1973 Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman film, being based on the same “true story”, but of countless other movies about long-term incarceration, whether Midnight Express (with its fetishistic slow-motion violence) or even Birdman Of Alcatraz.

Here, Charlie Hunnam plays Henri “Papillon” Charrière. As in last year’s The Lost City of Z, in which he was an explorer venturing deep into the Amazonian jungle, Hunnam throws himself into a physically demanding role with complete conviction. We see him first with his head sticking out of a gap in a cell door, looking like a suffering martyr.

Danish director Michael Noer whisks us back in time to what the intertitles tell us is Paris in 1931, although it seems strangely like Chicago in the Al Capone era. Everyone speaks with American accents. Henri is a dashing young safebreaker with a beautiful girlfriend, Nennete (Eve Hewson, last seen as Maid Marian in Robin Hood). He gives her much of the jewellery he filches. They’re planning to set up home together, possibly in the countryside (although he’s worried there won’t be enough for him to steal there). Then he is arrested, framed for murder, and sent off to a penal colony in French Guiana.

At this point, Nennete drops out of the film altogether (although Henri has a tattoo of her on his chest alongside that of a butterfly). Henri’s obsession now is with fellow prisoner, Louis Dega (Rami Malek in a role very different from his Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody). Louis, an alleged forger, is bespectacled and puny but he has money. Henri volunteers to be his protector, primarily because he hopes Louis will subsidise his escape attempts.

Gradually, the two men become emotionally dependent on one another. Both forget about the women back home, ostensibly waiting for them.

The filmmakers do a fair job of conveying the squalor and brutality of life in the penal colony. The prisoners are told that France has disowned them. If they even try to escape, they face years in solitary confinement. Either that, or the sharks will get them first. There is a guillotine overlooking the courtyard, the wall in front of it stained red with blood. Anyone lucky enough to have smuggled in any money hides it in their guts (if they get diarrhoea, it can spell catastrophe).

At first, Papillon shapes up as an action thriller. Henri is determined to break out. Director Noer throws in brawls in the showers, scenes of the guards brutally abusing the inmates and of the dapper prison governor, Warden Barrot (Yorick van Wageningen), calmly telling them of the grim fate awaiting anyone who steps out of line. The prison authorities don’t even pretend to try to rehabilitate the prisoners. “We know that is useless so we do our best to break you,” the warden warns Henri.

These early scenes are similar in tone to Noer’s 2010 Danish-made contemporary prison drama, R. The convicts cope as best as they can in an extremely hostile and violent environment. However, as the film goes on and on, its preoccupations change. The storytelling becomes more reflective and philosophical. Henri himself – the cocksure, self-reliant thief – endures torture, near starvation and endless solitude with a resolution matching that of the priests in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Louis, meanwhile, shows cunning and survival skills which make you wonder why he was so dependent on Henri in the first place.

The film gradually loses its spark as the men become accustomed to their captivity. Time passes in an erratic fashion. A single action sequence will take a few minutes of screen time – and so will the passing of several years. The attempts at escape are staged in very routine fashion. We can guess in advance just when characters are going to buckle their ankles leaping off walls or when they will betray one another.

“We are all animals in here,” one prisoner observes. The behaviour of the inmates often bears out such a pessimistic summation. However, just as we might also predict, the prisoners can show altruism and courage too.

Aaron Guzikowski’s screenplay doesn’t explain why Henri was so desperate to write about his experiences. This is a competent and workmanlike version of a story which has been told before, but it doesn’t cast any new light on its central characters or on the system which treated them so brutally.