Anchored by a marvellously clapped-out performance from Brian Cox, The Escapist is a prison-break drama that plays stylishly with the conventions of the genre. Cox plays Frank, a lifer in an unnamed British jail whose institutionalised trance is disturbed by news from the outside world, and a cellmate (Dominic Cooper) who reminds him of his young self.

Frank and a group of fellow inmates, who include a dreadlocked drug dealer, played by Seu Jorge of City of God, and a shaven-headed boxer (Joseph Fiennes), plot and attempt their escape in gripping, artfully assembled flash-forwards, but it’s not just the mechanics of their bid for freedom that interest the first-time director Rupert Wyatt. He’s equally concerned with the more metaphysical effects of long-term incarceration on the human psyche. The prison is a dreamlike space, and the director is careful to keep the period uncertain, sending his boiler-suited convicts into a clanking world of beige that could belong in any year of the last century.

The supporting cast is a curate’s egg: Steven Mackintosh is chilling as a predatory weirdo, while Fiennes is miscast. But this is Cox’s film. Whether he is slumping in his bunk or letting a shower run over his mound of a body, his sense of cowed acceptance is mesmeric — as are his rare glints of defiance.

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