For Your Consideration: 12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Now five years a director, Steve McQueen’s third feature 12 Years a Slave is the former Turner-winning artist’s most ambitious one yet – and that’s no mean feat considering it follows his bleakly graphic Bobby Sands picture Hunger and the seedy sex-fiend festival Shame.

Like the holocaust and, apparently, Spider-Man, the incarceration into slavery of the black race in 19th century North America is one of such despicability and resonating outrage that it bears perpetual retelling and retelling again. And although ‘Spidey Senses’™ and ‘Kirsten Dunst in a sodden low cut top‘™ would seem somewhat out of place in 12 Years a Slave’s narrative, Steve McQueen instead brings the full weight of history with all the unmentionable veracity and heft the subject and film requires.

Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) begins the film a ‘freeman’ living with his family in 1840s New York State, until he is kidnapped by two white chancers and sold into slavery. The subsequent 12 years (I know, what a coincidence, eh?) is a relentless fight for Northup’s physical and mental survival, under the oppression of slave owners ranging from the relatively kindly Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) to the near enough psychotic Epps (Michael Fassbender).

It is always slightly tricky to review a film which is so universally well revered as 12 Years a Slave. It leaves one resorting to hole picking in order to find something new or insightful to proffer. But finding fault with McQueen’s work is rarely an easy task, and this is two and a quarter hours of film making from the very highest order.