A Prayer Before Dawn is a 2018 biographical crime drama about an English boxer incarcerated in one of Thailand’s most notorious prisons as he fights in tournaments to earn his freedom.
The first thing you notice about the brutal A Prayer Before Dawn is that it’s not typical. This isn’t the story of a scrappy underdog building a name to fame but rather that of a tortured, troubled soul in a harsh new world facing the consequences of some truly bad decisions. Immediately after that is how authentic it feels, refusing to adopt any of the tropes of the fighter genre in favor of a close up, hands on approach that sort of feels like a mix between a prison documentary film and an intimate fight for survival. It’s as breathtaking as it is harrowing.
Billy Moore (Joe Cole) is a young Englishman living in Thailand as a ring fighter, taking beatings for money he wastes on heroin. It defines his life, bending every turn in his singular existence. This eventually leads to a sudden and swift arrest where he’s tossed into the local jail absolutely stacked to the rafters in Thai criminals. He’s an obvious standout. Struggling to learn his way around the overcrowded, ultra-violent prison, his worst nightmare is his addiction, soon getting involved in gangs to stay hooked. He is befriended by Fame (Pornchanok Mabklang), a young transexual who offers him his only hope for kindness while his fighting skills eventually gets the attention of the Warden, who puts him into the prison boxing program with hope to improve his lot.
Uncompromising in its style and conviction, director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire is dealing two hands here, one on the redemptive power of fighting and the horrors of life behind bars in a foreign jail. Why Billy is in Thailand is not important, he’s clearly sunk into a pit of demons that have left him in service to his own baser needs. Needless to say, it only gets worse once behind bars, the bleak and crushing violence a new way of life that is soaked in drugs, rape, and death.
To call the film unrelenting would be an understatement. It’s raw and visceral, with Billy at the center of dangerous inmates and corrupt guards who keep Billy on drugs as payment to be their bloody enforcer on other inmates. It’s jarring to watch, Sauvaire committed to an almost hyper-realism that grabs you by the throat and never lets go.
What’s truly interesting about the experience though is how humanizing it is, despite its brutality, the relationship Billy has with Fame and the identity he adopts to stay alive, even as we wonder if that’s a thing he even wants to be. Cole is a fearsome presence from the start, yet just as easily imbibes Billy with staggering depth. It’s a career-changing performance.
Based around Billy Moore‘s book, A Prayer Before Dawn is an unflinching look at a life in spiral as told through a paralyzing lens. Even with its extreme violence, there are moments of daunting emotional impact that keep this far above the fighting genre. It’s an uneasy ride, often profound, often hard to watch, becoming one of the most horrifying and moving movie experiences of the year.