Synopsis
The amazing true story of Billy Moore, an English boxer incarcerated in Thailand’s most notorious prison. Thrown into a world of drugs and violence, he finds his best chance to escape is to fight his way out in prison Muay Thai tournaments.
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Cast
- Joe ColeBilly Moore
- Vithaya PansringarmOfficer Preecha
- Pornchanok MabklangFame
- Somrak KhamsingSuthin
- Nic ShakeDoctor
- Panya YimmumphaiKeng
- Sura SirmalaiChanachol
- Sakda NiamhomSaiyok
- Billy MooreBilly Moore's Father
- Komsan PolsanPatumsuk
Recommendations
- 100
Empire
For all the flying fists and the hero’s nightmarish predicament, the notions of redemption examined here are plenty deep. Add that to the bone-crunchingly effective technique and flawless lead performance, and you have yourself something very rare: a testosterone-driven narrative that’s about nurturing, rather than destruction. And one that achieves a bleeding-knuckled profundity. - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
Prayer dwells with almost swooning rapture on the bodies of young men as they mete out brutal violence on one another, and features a cast composed mostly of unknowns, impressively coached in order to deliver arresting turns onscreen. - 80
Screen Daily
Cole, best known for a supporting role in the TV series Peaky Blinders, gives everything to this role. It’s a physical transformation in which he convincingly plays a beaten, battered-to-a-pulp boxer who learns the rules of Muay Thai, but also a deep internal reach to deliver a complex, defiantly self-sabotaging character with depth of understanding. - 80
Variety
At once exhausting and astonishing, this no-holds-barred adaptation of British junkie-turned-pugilist Billy Moore’s Thai prison memoir is a big, bleeding feat of extreme cinema, given elevating human dimension by rising star Joe Cole’s ferociously physical lead performance. - 67
IndieWire
Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s film is not so much the story of a fighter as it is a story that wants to fight you. - 67
Consequence
What makes A Prayer Before Dawn so powerful is also what makes it so punishing. - 63
Movie Nation
It’s not a reinvention of the genre, but it is a fairly engrossing variation on a theme. And that’s in large part due to the violence — sexual and otherwise — it recreates. - 63
Slant Magazine
A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.
