12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave is an outstanding film, cautiously yet confidently condensing over a decade's worth of lesions into a cruel, wicked, sensitive, combative humanitarian analysis of slavery's perverse apocalyptic logic, without simply establishing stock polar oppositions but still proceeding unambiguously enough for good to be clearly distinguished from evil, this willowing contrast patiently woven by a perceptive painstaking piecemeal punctuality whose periods and com(m)as aren't definitely placed, but rather gradually appear and fade as the years pass, flowing into one another while delineating crescents, conscious of the a/temporal confines of progressive thoughts shortsightedly dominated by racist hierarchical sludge, wherein Christian principles lie in ruin yet are ignorantly and emphatically pontificated nonetheless, this oppressive static systematic abuse inevitably engendering madness, this sustained a/temporal madness captured again and again by the unforgiving sadistic capricious misery inflicted on the suffering, McQueen's morose humble vicious living characters defining slavery's hopeless absolute perfidy, and the monstrous affects of its cultural applications.

12 Years a Slave unreels like a biographical film, but is anything but a simple chronological serialization of events.

Each sequence rather develops an affect of its own, united by the general tragedy, but separate animate pieces still, as if McQueen took the extra time and care to consider each component's vital individuality while crafting it, in order to formally elevate freedom's fluctuating fervours, a voice of protest unconsciously applied, for characters facing the whip for minor transgressions.

Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) has a small role but she stands out, having delivered the best supporting performance I've seen this year.

She doesn't appear often but when she does she affectively commands every desperate beaten nanosecond, as if, for a brief moment, the entire film solely concerns her, and will only make an impact if she performs second to none.

She also diversifies Solomon Northup's (Chiwetel Ejiofor) character by making a reasonable request which the memory of his former freedoms and hopes to one day regain them disables him from granting.

Thereby further intensifying the madness.

Acting as if it's nothing out of the ordinary.