It’s Jacques Audiard season at the BFI Southbank this month, a man whose most recent film, ‘The Prophet’, has been on a lot of critics choice lists in recent weeks and is on general release from next week. Audiard picked up a bit of a reputation in French cinema with his 2001 film ‘Read My Lips’ (starring Vincent Cassell) and the widely acclaimed ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’.

Accolades continue to pile up, with his latest film, which picked Best Award at the London Film Festival. ‘The Prophet’ tells the story of Malik El Djebena (Tahar Raham), a 19-year-old orphan kid of Maghrébin (North African) descent who is sent down for six years. As a new boy in the prison system with no friends on the inside or the outside, he’s given a crash course in penitentiary politics, which prove to be more than a little grizzly – there’s one particularly ‘authentic’ murder scene where blood gurgles from the victim’s carotid artery like in a Japanese jidaigeki flick, which makes ‘Scum’ seem like ‘High School Musical’.

Whether through the films of Michel Haneke or Gaspard Noé, French cinema in recent years seems to have excelled at a kind of hardboiled realism that pulls no punches, and ‘A Prophet’ is no exception to the tradition. But there’s also a lighter, more redemptive, side to the film, as Malik begins to settle into his stretch and, from the inside, starts shifting kilos from the comfort of his cell in scenes that are reminiscent of The Wire. It all builds up to an exhilarating and ineluctable climax that will leave feeling like you’ve been put through a spin cycle. Just like in Audiard’s previous two films, the tension never lets up.

But if Audiard is hailed as the master of the French thriller, he’s not without antecedents, as the BFI are keen to point out. Their season is also showing films by Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean Renoir and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ‘Les Diaboliques’. Audiard’s earlier films are also being screened, so make sure you catch them while you can.

Check the BFI listings here

‘A Prophet’ trailer