Director Steve McQueen’s third feature film is a graphic, mordant adaptation of Solomon Northup’s memoir of captivity and slavery in the years before the United States’ Civil War.

In 1841, Northup – free man, husband, father, carpenter and musician – was kidnapped and sold into slavery. During his time as a slave, Northup suffered agonies at the hands of the men who bought, sold and traded him. Although his story has a modicum of resolution, every aspect of it is rendered in the shadow of its era: most slaves were afforded no respite from that existence.

McQueen does not spare historic Christianity for the justification of slavery its adherents found in the pages of the Bible. Even the people of demonstrable conscience who Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) encounters fail him at almost every turn, whether by cowardice, silence or an inability to see outside their own social mores. Northup’s first master, John Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) treats him with a kindness which only illustrates the fact that anything a master does for a slave ultimately benefits the master. In part to save Northup from the threat of lynching, Ford passes him off as payment on a debt to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a maniacal, vicious drunk who alternately sermonizes and beats the men and women who work his fields. Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson) is bitterly jealous of her husband’s regard for a slave woman named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o).  Northup, unable to defend or aid Patsey, finds himself an instrument of her torment at the command of Epps.

Ejiofor is a study in anguish and determination…

There is not a bad performance among the cast, although by the time abolition-minded Canadian Bass (Brad Pitt) turns up, his sincere view of slavery as morally wrong rings hollow: a mockery of the men and women in his presence unable to speak on their own behalf as freely as he does. Ejiofor is a study in anguish and determination, alternately bristling with indignant disbelief at his circumstances or shattered by cruelty and misery. Watching Lupita Nyong’o almost physically hurts, so tangible is her suffering, and Fassbender is exaltedly unrestrained in his whims and savagery, thoroughly convinced of his own righteousness. Bass suggests to Epps a reversal of fortune, a world in which white skin means inferiority. “That’s not a supposable case,” Epps responds, embodying a privilege with nothing to gain from such empathy or imagination.

Northup’s book began with his origins and the circumstances of his free life, but McQueen puzzlingly starts the tale in the middle, with Northup already enslaved. A series of flashbacks recount how he got there, but the chronological shifts do nothing for the emotional pacing of the film. Scenes that show Northup’s free life in Saratoga better serve to build dread of what’s to come. The scene in which Northup realizes he’s been kidnapped bears comparison to similar scenes in horror films, and as ordinary people behave monstrously to one another, the film has some sensibilities in common with horror as a genre. 12 YEARS A SLAVE exposes the horror in history, ugliness with its origins in the dark of the human heart.

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