Gus Van Sant's best returns with an electric thriller

After several years navigating a purgatory of impersonal film projects and forgettable series, Gus Van Sant returns to the cinematic forefront with Prime Crime: A True Story, a title that suggests a made-for-television crime drama but hides other things. To begin with, a portrait of class struggle in which the director of Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and Elephant (2003) sides with a common man (an energetic Bill Skarsgard) who, in 1977 Indianapolis, kidnaps a banker's son in revenge for his financial scams (a well-delivered and sly Al Pacino).

Van Sant lucidly arranges the pieces of the confrontation on the board between a proletarian David – but more Yankee than anyone in his faith in the American Dream – and a capitalist Goliath, and then executes a cinematic spectacle that combines electric staging and a stimulating experimental drive. Using the codes of the thriller, Prime Crime recalls the dramatic pressure cookers of Billy Wilder's The Big Carnival, Sidney Lumet's Serpico and Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. But, far from any classicism, Van Sant has a blast mixing a wide repertoire of visual tricks, from split screens to games with video format and artificial light (days that become nights, realities that turn into nightmares). The indie poet of forgotten America remains in top form.