“12 Years a Slave“ is a great film. Steve McQueen’s direction does not flinch away from the grim realities of the pre-Civil War South, and Solomon Northrup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) incredible story endures after the credits roll.

In 1841, Solomon Northup is a free black man living in Saratoga Spring, New York with his wife and two children. An accomplished carpenter and respected musician, he is convinced by two men (Scoot McNairy and Taran Killam) to join a tour to play violin until reaching Washington, D.C. The last day of the tour, he is drugged and kidnapped into slavery spending the next 12 years as a slave moving from plantation to plantation.

Although this movie is shot beautifully when it needs to be, McQueen lets the camera linger on the atrocities committed to people taken as slaves. Much like McQueen’s previous film “Shame,” many scenes are hard to watch because they are so graphic. These images and actions are disturbing, but by forcing the audience to see them in grim detail allows a connection with the film in a visceral way that would be severely limited without these scenes. One especially effective scene is a scene where Solomon is hanged from a tree just low enough to barely breath. The scene is amplified by how plainly shot and how brutal it is.

This film is full of amazing performances by its cast, but Chiwetel Ejiofor is the driving force behind the film. His transformation from a man happy and free to someone enslaved and abused deserves an Academy Award. It is easy to see Solomon’s internal conflict when he is faced with decisions with no “right” answer for him and the scenes in which Ejiofor showed Solomon happy or relieved were captured incredibly well.

Some of the biggest names in the film, like Paul Giamatti as a slave salesman and Paul Dano as a plantation slave driver, are not on screen very long but still add greatly to the film. I was surprised to see Brad Pitt as a traveling carpenter, but even his notability does not eclipse the feeling of reality captured in “12 Years a Slave.”

Benedict Cumberbatch does well in his short appearance as Ford. The subtlety in his performance is dwarfed, though, by Michael Fassbender’s high energy display as Edwin Epps, an evil plantation owner with an equally evil wife, Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson). McQueen spends a little more time on Epps than necessary to the story, but his performance is subtle enough to capture the hypocrisy in Epps’ views while still doing horrible things to people.

I highly recommend this film, even though many movies like it have been made, and I know I am going to hear at least a few comparisons to last years “Django Unchained.” McQueen shows the time of slavery in such raw light that it should be seen. It is graphic and brutal, but I would still recommend it to anyone who wants to see the great injustice of the pre-civil war era through the eyes of a slave.

5/5