Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

A Prayer Before Dawn Blu-ray Movie Review

Raging Horse.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 19, 2018

Jazz fans may come to this review wondering if there’s been an audio Blu-ray release of a rather nice and kind of relaxing Pharoah Sanders album that has this same title, but, no, this particular A Prayer Before Dawn is kind of half Midnight Express and half whatever film is in your personal memory bank dealing with a fighter learning the ins and outs of a particular martial arts technique (in this case Muay Thai, which may automatically bring entries like Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior to mind). In other words, this A Prayer Before Dawn is neither “nice” nor “relaxing”, and is indeed often a harrowing portrait of a British guy named Billy Moore (Joe Cole), who is already struggling with a substance abuse problem when he arrives in Thailand. Cole was a visceral presence in Green Room, a troubling film shot in my home state of Oregon (those who didn’t see it when it first appeared may be interested in my interview with Mary McDonald-Lewis, who coached star Patrick Stewart on his “American” accent in the film), and Cole offers a standout portrait of a drug addict battling in more than one way. The film has a kind of dank, dingy ambience that doesn’t make it an “easy” watch, but the story, evidently culled from a real life memoir by the actual Billy Moore, is often riveting.

In a kind of interesting presentational conceit, large swaths of the first part of A Prayer Before Dawn are virtually dialogue free, and then when talking does start happening, quite a bit of it is in Thai, with subtitles being offered only intermittently. That immediately thrusts the viewer into the same sort of disorientation that is being experienced by Billy himself, though as the early part of the film amply documents, part of his confusion is no doubt due to his ongoing heroin use. One of the “untranslated” sequences actually deals with Billy’s arrest and imprisonment (part of this sequence is indeed played “silently”, with what looks like Billy’s sentencing taking place behind a glass partition where no sound is heard), though one assumes the situation is due to either his drug use or perhaps some drug dealing.

One way or the other, the first hour or so of the film deals with the absolutely terrifying realities of a Thai prison, where prisoners are housed in overcrowded “great rooms” where skirmishes frequently break out and where everyone just kind of sleeps on the floor in one amorphous mass. Some really disturbing sexual content is depicted in this part of the film which may be completely unsettling for more prudish viewers (some later content involves a so-called "ladyboy", in a kind of fascinating twist on typical romance angles in sporting films), but the general tenor of this section of A Prayer Before Dawn is to depict Billy’s terror at finding himself in a situation which he only sporadically understands, on any number of levels.

There is rampant drug use at this facility, including some evidently helped along by guards, in what is another kind of unexplained or at least undeveloped aspect. Billy finally manages to wend his way into a training camp for boxers at the prison, as well as to fight in another way to stay clean and sober, which is where A Prayer Before Dawn arguably becomes perhaps a bit more rote. Billy of course ends up being a “savant” of sorts, and soon is selected to represent the prison in a kind of intramural event involving other penitentiaries.

What’s rather unique about A Prayer Before Dawn is how it takes some boxing film clichés and rather radically reinvents them. The film is often viscerally disturbing, with scenes of everything from homosexual rape to rampant beatings to forced tattooing, and as such A Prayer Before Dawn has the tendency to shock more than “entertain”. It’s a frightening story which seems to have a more or less happy ending (the real life Billy Moore shows up in a cameo toward the end of the film), but this is one completely chilling journey that requires a bit of intestinal fortitude on the part of the viewer in order to get there.

A Prayer Before Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Prayer Before Dawn is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.38:1. The IMDb lists Arri Alexa cameras for this shoot, and I'm assuming things were finished at a 2K DI (as always, if anyone has authoritative data to the contrary, message me and I'll happily update the review). Considering the fact that so much of this film takes place in the shadowy confines of the prison, and that either lighting conditions or outright grading tends to give things a kind of yellow-green tint a lot of the time, detail levels are quite consistently high throughout the presentation. Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and cinematographer David Ungaro favor a kind of hand held ambience which often includes extreme close-ups (where focus pulling can sometimes waft in and out of sharpness), with fine detail on the sometimes gruesome injuries to faces being pretty disturbing at times. The film also opts for some "POV" moments, including when Billy has been pummeled to within an inch of his life, and those are understandably almost Impressionistic in terms of soft imagery and a kind of hazy, hallucinatory vibe.

A Prayer Before Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

A Prayer Before Dawn features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that is ostensibly in English, but which contains a fair amount of Thai, including quite a bit that optional subtitles fail to translate. The film has really interesting use of music, including what are evidently authentic Thai songs, but some of the most immersive surround activity actually comes courtesy of the almost claustrophobic environment of the various prison locations, where the cacophony of huge groups of men, often in heated interchanges, spills through the side and rear channels. Some of the Thai performers actually speak individual lines in a kind of broken English, and some of those lines are thankfully granted English subtitles, since they can be a bit hard to make out due to heavy accents. That said, all of the dialogue is rendered cleanly, and the entire mix is vivid and lifelike.

A Prayer Before Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Locked Inside the Walls: Making A Prayer Before Dawn (1080p; 15:38) is an above average EPK simply because the subject matter is so visceral and the interviews have a certain gravitas.


• Billy Moore: In His Own Words (1080p; 11:14) is an interesting interview with Moore done on the set of the film during the last week of production.

A Prayer Before Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A Prayer Before Dawn is an absolutely riveting tale, in part because the presentational conceit here deliberately obscures what's going on, especially in the early going. Cole is absolutely amazing in a very difficult role, but those interested in the film should be prepared for some pretty agonizing scenes. This is not a film for either the squeamish or for want of a better term what I'd call sexually conservative. With those caveats, technical merits are first rate, and A Prayer Before Dawn comes Recommended.