The third entry in the Harry Potter series of movies saw some changes taking place. Christopher Columbus stepped away from the director’s chair, feeling he needed to spend some actual time with his family after the fairly intense work of the first two films, and the unfortunate passing of Richard Harris meant that a new Dumbledore was required. Having approached several directors including Guillermo del Toro who turned the opportunity down as it was ‘too full of light’ for him, eventually the studio signed on Alfonso Cuaron to direct. With Michael Gambon taking the role of Dumbledore, things were set for the most expansive tale set in J K Rowling’s world to date – but, asks Greg D. Smith, how would it go down with fans and critics?

When notorious criminal Sirius Black escapes from Azkaban prison, the wizarding world is thrown into panic. But Harry can’t understand why everyone seems particularly concerned about him. What he discovers will turn his whole world upside down in more ways than one.

Accepted wisdom says that this is the first ‘dark’ entry in the Harry Potter movie franchise, and as I covered in the previous piece, I don’t hold to that notion in hindsight. However, what this film does represent is a significant stylistic shift which emphasises the darkness in the plot and allows the director to play with ideas in a unique way, bringing out new sides to elements we have seen before.

What’s immediately striking on this re-watch is how, as the series progresses, each film sees Harry spending less and less time in the muggle world. Here, it’s barely a couple of scenes, including the pre-title opening of Harry practising spells and then the scene in which he accidentally ‘blows up his aunt’ and then storms out of the house and ends up on the Knight Bus. The factor linking these scenes is darkness – Harry is practising the Lumos spell under his bedclothes at night, the meal with Marge is an evening meal where it’s shifting into twilight such that he stumbles out with his suitcase into darkness to take a trip on the Knight Bus. The common theme here is of magic being the thing which saves Harry from the darkness (literal and metaphorical) of the muggle world. Lumos lights his bedroom, instinctive magic turns Marge into a figure of ridicule as she sits there saying hurtful things about Harry’s dead parents, and the Knight Bus rescues him from the dark pavement when he sees a dark dog emerging from the shadows to watch him.

Where Columbus was perhaps a little visually obvious with these sorts of metaphors – the grim dreariness of the colour palette in the muggle world compared to the bright primary colours of Hogwarts, Cuaron is subtler, specifying the difference as being the magic itself. This follows through into the outfits worn by our protagonists – much more time spent in jeans and sweaters, on the Hogwarts Express and at the school, with uniforms for lessons much more conventional rather than the robes of the last two instalments. There’s certainly still a vibrancy about Hogwarts, but it is conveyed structurally rather than by simple use of colour palette and this is of course crucial because of the way in which the narrative progresses.

Weather and the time of day is used to simple but striking effect in helping to convey this subtext as well. The Hogwarts Express is making its way in darkness this time, with a heavy thunderstorm outside. The Quidditch match (or part thereof) that we see takes place in a violent storm with the accompanying greyness. The three protagonists witness the apparent execution of Buckbeak just before twilight and the third act takes place entirely at night with Harry and Sirius saved from the Dementors by the appearance of a powerful patronus which lights up the clearing they’re in and drives the Dementors – creatures whose appearance suggests that they are composed of shadow – physically away.

By contrast, happy times mostly take place in daylight if not actual sunshine. Harry’s being presented with the Marauders’ Map, his illicit trip to Hogsmeade to fill up with sweets and butterbeer, and his uniting with Hermione and Ron having scared Draco and his two henchmen senseless: all have bright crisp daylight as a backdrop. If you need further convincing that none of this is an accident, consider that when Harry listens in on the conversation between Fudge and Rosmerta about Sirius, it’s in the darker confines of the pub, and when he runs out to weep and rage at this, he’s under the cloak and in a secluded clearing surrounded by trees.

The messaging feels obvious – this is a film about a war between the light and the dark. Where that messaging becomes very interesting is in its juxtaposition against the plot itself, which presents the unsuspecting viewer with an apparently clear, black and white villain of the piece and then swiftly turns the whole thing on its head. For all that Harry spends the first two acts of the movie engaged in this binary decision-making (first with the clearly vindictive Marge, then against the Dementors themselves and against Malfoy as usual, and finally against Sirius himself), the third act finds our hero learning a lot of things which muddle the picture significantly – the person he thought he could reasonably loathe turns out to have been wrongly accused. The person who was supposedly killed having tried to defy Sirius turns out not only to be very much alive but also to have been the actual direct architect of Harry’s parents’ fate. For all the use of light and dark to portray a binary impression of good vs evil, the story which Cuaron then proceeds to unwind (from the pen of Rowling herself of course) becomes one of various shades of grey, and what’s interesting is that although that factor becomes clarified in the third act, it’s actually been there all along in hindsight as an undercurrent.

Consider, for example, Fudge’s reaction to Harry’s having broken the underage wizarding decree – Harry gets not so much as a slapped wrist, when he’s convinced he is about to be expelled. The reason? Not that Fudge understands Harry’s frustration with his cruel muggle family, but that he understands the publicity angle of protecting Harry as much as possible at a time when a man suspected of wanting very much to kill Harry is on the loose. Consider further the fact that Dumbledore hires a man he knows to be a werewolf to be a teacher at the school. Dumbledore is not a fool – he knows full well the potential implications of having Lupin on the premises with Dementors around – indeed, Snape himself reiterates that he warned Dumbledore of the foolishness of the appointment. But Dumbledore is also kind, knowing that Lupin is a talented wizard and also an outcast in need of a helping hand. Every adult in the story, while attempting to instil a concrete sense of right and wrong in their young charges, is constantly navigating the shades of grey that exist in-between. It is perhaps fitting that of all of them, only Dumbledore himself is neither surprised nor especially flustered by the fact that the students develop their own judgements on matters.

And we need to speak about Gambon’s take on this character. As I have said before, Harris’ portrayal tended towards the twinkly Grandfather aspect, which worked both in the narrative framework created by Columbus’ direction as well as for the early years of an impressionable Harry being wowed by the new world he was discovering. Dumbledore in those early movies needed to be a distant figure, representing security and optimism. Here, in the first tale to really start digging into the greyness of that world, the areas between good and evil, we needed a more complex take – the kind, pragmatic, bohemian and unapologetically rebellious Dumbledore of the novels, who would eventually go on to inspire, amongst other things, a student uprising. Gambon is a perfect choice for the role – the main quality of Dumbledore which is essential is that razor edge between the approachable father figure and the unknowable enigma and Gambon treads that line to perfection. His blatant stalling of Fudge while he waits for Hermione and Harry to quietly take Buckbeak away is so obvious as to be laughable. His enigmatic instructions to them in the tower about saving more than one innocent life is frustratingly vague, and his response to the pair of them when they come back and tell him they’ve done it – “Done what” is delivered in exactly the correct deadpan way that you could almost believe he’s serious. Although he doesn’t get an awful lot of screen time, Gambon sets himself out early as the Dumbledore the series needed, even if we didn’t know it yet.

Radcliffe, by contrast, struggles here in what is one of his weaker performances as the title character. It’s a shame, but the slightly awkward quality which served him so well in the first two films as a small child with an endearing sense of wonder just begins to fall flat here. There’s a sense that Cuaron wanted real emotion from the character, who has to go through so much in this instalment, but Radcliffe’s performance seems to equate emoting with shouting louder. Pivotal and highly emotional scenes are therefore rendered slightly nonsensical by Radcliffe shouting to camera in a voice that sounds on the verge of breaking but carries no weight of emotion to it. His declaration, for example, that Sirius was his parents’ friend and that he hopes he does find him so he can kill him just sounds oddly flat, albeit loudly expressed.

Fortunately, there’s a stellar supporting cast around him who pick up the heavy lifting like champions. David Thewlis’ Lupin is perfectly pitched as the weary middle-aged man who has grown old before his time. The quietness of his delivery is backed by a hint of unflinching steel in the demeanour, first hinted at when he crosses paths with Snape and Harry in the corridors at night. That steel flashes at both Snape as he takes the Marauder’s Map from him, and at Harry when he lectures him about the dangers of his being alone at night.

Gary Oldman – surprising nobody at all – knocks it out of the park with Sirius. Once again, there’s not much screen time for him, but what he gets is used to the fullest extent. His ability to go from semi-crazed hysteria to calm, deliberate menace to thoughtful calm and back again is one that is perhaps unmatched in his filed, and is the absolute best fit for Sirius – a character who is simultaneously fantastically noble and impulsive to the point of selfishness. It never occurs to Sirius to explain himself to a terrified Harry and Ron who both assume he’s there to kill them, just like it never occurs to him that however much he might genuinely love Harry, his offer of his godson coming to live with him is fantastically short-sighted, given his time in prison and the clear traumas he has survived.

Grint and Watson start to get the Ron and Hermione romantic angle fired up properly here, with several moments at both ends of the scale (shouting and bickering plus occasional moments of accidental tenderness). What’s slightly frustrating is that although Hermione gets more to do besides that – use of the Time Turner is crucial to the third act and she also gets to punch Malfoy in the face – Ron by contrast doesn’t get much at all. This is largely because Grint’s gift is for comic timing, and with the tone of the film overall substantially more serious, that doesn’t leave a lot of room. Watson isn’t much better served – it’s arguable that the Time Turner itself rather than the character of Hermione is vital in the resolution of the plot at the end – but she does at least get to have some agency outside of the Ron/Hermione relationship which is lacking for Grint.

The new star of the piece though, is the castle itself. It’s difficult to adequately explain how Columbus managed to make something as grandiose as a castle feel small, and to be honest it never really occurs that he did until seeing Cuaron’s interpretation of it. Little things like Hagrid’s hut being not only larger but also further removed from the castle itself combine with bigger details like the lake we see Harry fly over, the more sprawling aspect to the castle itself and the wider world around it represented by Hogsmeade. Some may feel that this feels like an artificial break in the visual continuity of the series, but let us remember that this is the first year that our heroes are allowed visits to Hogsmeade, and that they are at an age where they begin to notice more of their surroundings, being slightly less overawed by simply being at Hogwarts. Bear in mind also that this sort of expansion of their perception of the wider world is exactly what is needed for them to accept the real truth about Sirius and the events of years past, and that it is them who find this so much easier to accept than adults – Lupin, one of Sirius’ closest childhood friends, only starts to question the narrative of his guilt when he learns Peter Pettigrew is alive. Snape never questions it, and beyond Lupin, Dumbledore and our three protagonists ultimately nobody knows by the end of the movie of Sirius’ innocence. Viewed through this prism, the apparent ‘growth’ of the castle becomes simply the expansion of our young heroes’ horizons.

All things considered then, it’s a surprisingly sophisticated movie which takes full advantage of the visual medium to tell its story – not surprising from the director who would go on to deliver Gravity. As much if not more is relayed to the audience by the use of visuals, shade and light and dark as is by the use of dialogue. There rarely feels a moment when the movie stops for artificial exposition (as could happen in the first two) because of Cuaron’s artful direction – even when characters are expositing, it’s usually in a naturalistic way – Harry spying on the adults to discover more about Sirius’ supposed crimes, the way in which Sirius’ mad rambling stretches the patience of the audience to breaking point, such that we are silently begging Lupin to spill the beans to the protagonists and the audience. None of it ever feels as if the story pauses for a beat, and as a result it feels significantly tighter and more succinct than either of its predecessors, despite a run time of only ten minutes less than Philosopher’s Stone.

It’s a masterclass in economical storytelling utilising the full range of sensory inputs that film offers, delivering a satisfying action/mystery romp which delights and intrigues on first viewing and rewards multiple viewings afterward. Like Columbus, Cuaron never patronises his target audience, scattering clues throughout which are plain enough in hindsight but never jump out of the screen at the unsuspecting viewer. Simply put, it’s magic.