Fassbender's portrait of this rotten plantation owner – whose cotton is attacked by pests in what he's convinced is God's doing – is one of his most chilling creations, because there's no inveterate malice in the man, just a reckless, proprietorial indifference which has clawed away his moral sanity. He represents ownership in its most hellbent form. The situation of Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), his most adept cotton-picker, lures her to the calm brink of suicide: he's sexually obsessed with her, to a degree that makes his wife (a truly malicious Sarah Paulson) want her scratched out, expelled.
The scorching, intrepid Nyong'o is one of the film's miracles. McQueen gets devastating work, too, from Adepero Oduye (Pariah) as Eliza, ripped from her two children and sold by a garrulous trader (Paul Giamatti) to Cumberbatch's estate, where grief eats her alive. The mistress of the house (Liza J. Bennett) seems sympathetic upon her arrival: "Something to eat and some rest – your children will soon be forgotten," she says reassuringly, in a line that draws appalled laughter.
Even the smallest roles – Alfre Woodard's one stellar scene as an ex-slave comfortably ensconced in her master's favour, Brad Pitt's pair of them as a proponent of emancipation from Canada – give the movie new angles from which to survey the culture it's revisiting, a life of such daily abuse and iniquity that nature itself seems out of joint. McQueen's regular collaborators, especially cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and editor Joe Walker, help him keep ruthless focus without sentimentalising in the slightest, and find glimpses of terrible beauty in this inferno which never feel over-aestheticised. The embers of a burnt parchment winnow down to orange pinpricks swallowed by the dark, as Hans Zimmer's grave score – perhaps his most emotive since The Thin Red Line, but far more primal – whispers a dirge.
It may be hard to look at a cypress tree ever again without recalling the sequence where Northup, having briefly gained the upper hand over a vicious overseer (Paul Dano), is strung from a bough and hangs there for the best part of a day, while everyone on Cumberbatch's estate turns a blind eye. Amid moments of compassion, McQueen finds huge failings of solidarity among the slaves, very few of whom have the advantages of education Northup enjoyed. The director isn't importing a retrospective political sensibility into this, except to the degree that his protagonist and chief witness is ahead of his time, sees more, and understands more.
Ejiofor's gifts have never had this sustained or deserving a showcase, but it's part of their magic that he refuses to make it feel like one. He's in every scene of the film, sometimes in the background, sometimes in tight close-up, sometimes out of the frame but listening, head down. In his astonishingly absorbent performance, Northup is the sum of these experiences, and somehow, impossibly, it's a positive sum – his humanity, seared in this crucible, only gets larger. McQueen and Bobbitt find nothing more communicative than his eyes, deep pools of unplumbable longing – if you look at them for long enough, your own start to swim. It's the performance of his career, the film of his director's, and a must-brave experience whose justifiable collection of every film award going begins right here.
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