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Though she begs Ford to take her two young children, and though Solomon must play a violin to muffle the screams of Eliza’s kids, Ford cannot be troubled to buy them. Repellent is the word for the New Orleans slave trader Theophilus Freeman (Paul Giamatti), who tells prospective customers that the young black boy before them “will grow into a fine beast.” The plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch, who impersonates Julian Assange in this week’s The Fifth Estate) purchases Solomon/Platt and Eliza (Adepero Oduye, star of the indie film Pariah). (READ: Corliss on Gualtiero Jacopetti, the director of Addio zio Tom)

Indeed, McQueen’s film is closer in its storytelling particulars to such 1970s exploitation-exposés of slavery as Mandingo and the astoundingly coarse schlockumentary Addio zio Tom ( Goodbye, Uncle Tom). The difference is that McQueen’s scenes of black flesh peddled by venal salesmen are meant not to excite the senses but to repel any good conscience. These sprawling farms are no Tara - they are gulags - and 12 Years a Slave stands as a fierce refutation of the genial racial stereotypes on display in the Margaret Mitchell novel and David O. I want to live.” Instead, he keeps silent and endures the insult of a slave name: Platt Hamilton - yes, like Olivia de Havilland’s Melanie Hamilton from Gone With the Wind. If he wants to survive, a fellow black advises him, “Tell no one who you really are, and tell no one you can read and write, unless you want to be a dead nigger.” Northup insists, “I don’t want to survive.

Solomon is untutored at this deadly game. (READ: John Ridley on “Why I’m Good With the N Word”)

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(We do not learn why the kidnappers went to the trouble of importing a black man from upstate New York to the nation’s capital, when they could have corralled dozens, hundreds, who already lived there.) Ignoring his pleas of full citizenship, his captors beat him and send him south to servitude in Louisiana. Lured to Washington, D.C., for what he thinks is a brief musical engagement, he is pumped with alcohol until he passes out and awakes in chains. He earns a comfortable income as a fiddler and is treated as an equal by his white friends and neighbors.

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In the script by John Ridley, who wrote the novel Those Who Walk in Darkness and the screenplays for U Turn and Red Tails, Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is first seen as a free man in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with a loving wife and two children (one of them played by Quvenzhane Wallis of Beasts of the Southern Wild). You will recoil at every punishment, feel each slur, with an immediacy that makes the long-ago, “peculiar institution” of slavery as vivid as a whiplash. Here, McQueen immerses viewers in the magnolia-scented hell to which his protagonist was exiled. McQueen’s Hunger (2009) portrayed the hunger strike of IRA volunteer Bobby Sands his 2011 Shame detailed the bleak life of a Manhattan sex addict, and both films starred Michael Fassbender, who plays Epps in 12 Years a Slave. Northup has found an apt adaptor in the Anglo-African McQueen, whose first two features proved him a picture poet of physical degradation. The madmen are the masters in this searing film document, based on Twelve Years a Slave, the 1854 memoir of Solomon Northrup, a free black New Yorker abducted into servitude. (READ: Jessica Winter on director Steve McQueen) They know better than to help a renegade. The plantation owner’s wife stares at him from the veranda, ignoring his agony, as do the other slaves, going about their yard chores. Another slave is roped up to be hanged, his toes barely touching the ground, and there he dangles, when losing his balance means death. The lady of the plantation, jealous of the attentions her husband pays to a slave woman, shies a heavy glass decanter at the poor girl’s head. In director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, plantation owners poke and stroke the bodies of their slaves, appraising them like horseflesh - except that they would not flog, humiliate or sexually defile their livestock. In this example of the deranged quoting scripture, even the God of peace taught the inhumanity of one man to the men and women he thought of as animals. He quotes Luke 12:47: “And that servant … shall be beaten with many stripes.” By “many stripes,” the Louisiana plantation owner tells his slaves, Jesus meant 40 or 50. Follow Jesus approve of slavery, and of the whipping of a slaver’s chattel? Edwin Epps believes so.

Edwin epps