“Prisoners” is a film made of quality ingredients: a tense, nerve-frazzling story, quirky and edgy acting, painfully sharp, deep, blue collar sets and stark, cold, rusty, blunt symbolic exterior shots, all with enough moral ambiguity to fill a stained and soggy paper bag of reality.

It is Thanksgiving and two families (father Hugh Jackman, mother Maria Bello, a teenager son and a little girl) and (father Terrence Howard, mother Viola Davis, a teenage daughter and a little girl) have stuffed themselves and are in that state of mellow contentment. And then the two girls go off to play…and disappear.

The only hint of menace is a filthy RV that had been seen “lurking” around the neighborhood. It doesn’t take long for the police to track it down, most specifically by Jake Gyllenhaal, an odd but most effective detective, who always solves his cases. He also has an odd assortment of tattoos and a rather annoying tic, a harsh blinking of his eyes, particularly when thinking deeply. If you see the film, you must pay close attention or you will miss the hint as to why he is the way he is. One clear observation on the cast: all play their roles with maximum subtlety and superlative artistry.

Hugh Jackman’s character is nearly insane with frustration (perfectly understandable) but he decides to torture the person found in the truck (not a wise decision), a clearly mentally challenged, but very spooky young man (Paul Dano) who lives with his eerie aunt (Melissa Leo). Before you jump to conclusions there is a priest (or is he an ex-priest?) with a secret in his basement and another pervert with a predilection for shopping for children’s clothes and a devotion to a certain wacko book.

I said quality, not simple, ingredients.

All the characters are effected and affected. There are complexities and consequences and consequences of consequences. There are movies where the hero is a vigilante, a rogue avenger. This film is the anti-rogue avenger movie; it is the ugly truth of messy justice, not cinematic fantasy. Well, maybe it is a bit too artistic with perhaps a hint or two of improbability, but it isn’t TruTV, but, then, even TruTV isn’t true TV anymore.

If you think I am being ambiguous because I deleted a paragraph or a sentence or five, you would be in error. Well, maybe I am being ambiguous because of clumsy writing but I am also being ambiguous to keep you guessing. The end of the movie isn’t the allure of the film. In fact, the end is also ambiguous…but then again, maybe it isn’t.

This is a gritty thriller with all the right clicks, whirls, clinks and clunks. The grimace and queasiness contained therein are not due to the visual but the visceral. Grime and angst, the primal pain and elusiveness of desperately desired certainty, the crude, impatient need for immediate resolution and justice is all there but cruelly mixed with the anxiety of human infallibility and jagged imperfection.

I resist the temptation to add any other adjectives or nouns or verbs or adverbs but I can’t resist. It is a tepid cup of black, dark, very bitter coffee that somehow in some peculiar way quenches an incomprehensible thirst and leaves a lasting impression on the tongue; yet it burns an odd heady memory deep in that part of the brain that has yet been mapped to the point of understanding.

“Prisoners” earns four bow ties out of five.