Director: Steve McQueen Reviewer: Paul Sorrell 

This unflinchingly realistic depiction of Solomon Northup’s 12 years spent as a slave in Louisiana in the 1840s and 1850s is based on a book he wrote about his experiences. A century later, his memoir was plucked from obscurity by local historian Sue Eakin, who devoted her life to proving wrong the bookseller who handed a copy across the counter with the words "It’s nothing but a pack of lies".

A talented musician living a free life in Saratoga, New York, with his wife and children, Solomon is drugged by a pair of con men and smuggled by paddle steamer to America’s Deep South. There, under the slave name of Platt, he undergoes 12 years of unrelenting brutality, degradation and humiliation at the hands of a series of slave owners. Warned that any reference to his true identity and status as a free man, or the fact that he can read and write, will lead to his death, Solomon learns that he must guard every thought and action if he is to survive. Forced to act as "dumb niggers", slaves reinforce their owners’ perception that blacks are an inferior race.

The film’s depiction of slavery is relentlessly unsentimental. A group being sold is treated like cattle, made to strip naked and have their bodies inspected. They are forced to put up with all kinds of mistreatment without any hope of redress, sexually abused and subject to vicious floggings at their owner’s whim. Time and again, slaves pay a heavy price for jealousies and conflict among their masters. Challenged about his treatment of his workers, Solomon’s erratic and violent master, Edwin Epps, snarls: "I can do whatever I like with these people – I own them." So oppressive is this catalogue of abuse that we long for even a momentary escape. A brief scene showing caterpillars feeding on cotton bolls – a plague for which his slaves are absurdly blamed by Epps – comes as a visual and emotional oasis.

The film raises a whole raft of urgent moral issues. How could an ostensibly Christian society justify this institutionalised inhumanity? The cruel Epps uses the Bible to justify flogging and, while Solomon’s first master, the kindly Mr Ford, preaches to his workers from Scripture with something approaching Christian conviction, he is still a "slaver". The film’s most subversive character is an outsider – a jobbing builder from Canada who states his belief that laws are one thing, moral absolutes another. This leads the thoughtful viewer to consider modern forms of slavery, from sex tourism to the garment sweatshops of Asia. Or, in wider terms still, the injustice of a world built on an economic and political system where the many labour with little reward to enrich the privileged few. Food for thought, indeed.

Published in Tui Motu Magazine. April 2014: 29.