A few years ago, a movie like “The Escapist” would have been on the festival circuit, emerging with critical buzz as a tough-minded, compelling, suspenseful prison-escape film. It would have found its audience on the arthouse circuit and, perhaps, might have been a sleeper hit. 

“The Escapist,” which was at the 2008 Sundance, opens in New York on Friday at the Village East Cinemas – but it’s available on video on-demand as of Wednesday. That’s the wave of the future – well, really, the present – and, with luck, audiences will wise up and find movies like this one, the kind that don’t have the budget to flood the airwaves with commercials.

Taut, full of soul but with no sentimentality, “The Escapist” is about Frank Perry (Brian Cox), a prison lifer who hasn’t heard from his family in more than a decade. Then he gets a letter telling him that his daughter is a drug addict who is near death. So he frantically plots an escape to see her one more time.

Writer-director Rupert Wyatt tells Frank’s story on parallel tracks. The movie starts with the escape: Frank and four other inmates, breaking through a floor to drain pipes, crawling through the vent in the laundry dryer, then deeper into sewer and water tunnels and pipes, always with the sound of guards hot on their trail.

Those scenes alternate with the planning sequences: Frank and chums Brodie (Liam Cunningham) and Lenny (Jospeh Fiennes), figuring out the path, creating tools, plotting a timetable. It’s tense stuff because they have to keep it secret – not just from the guards but from Rizza (Damian Lewis), the boss con, and his squirrely henchman, Tony (Steven Mackintosh). Just to keep things interesting, Frank has a new cellmate, Lacey (Dominic Cooper) – and the handsome young Lacey has become the object of desire for Tony.

Wyatt never hypes the action or the suspense. Instead, he lets it unfold on its own terms: with spare but telling moments, whether it’s Frank, Brodie and Lenny doing their planning using dominos to chart the route, or the casual way the film deals with Tony’s predatory approach to Lacey and the surprising way Lacey deals with it. The tension is ingrained in the story and the performance by Brian Cox.

Wyatt recognizes just how familiar these various tropes are, particularly as TV has brought them into our homes. The brutality of life in prison can never out-sensationalize “Oz,” and the intricacies of an escape plan will never be more elaborate than the ones put into play during the first season of “Prison Break.”

Instead, he creates compelling characters whose whole lives are on their faces. Cox, an outstanding actor who never seems to do bad work, can shift from cagey to compassionate to world-weary in a few seconds and a casual change of expression. He and the other characters don’t need to talk about their lives; they reveal everything in their body language and their manner of conversation.

I also particularly liked Damian Lewis as the chilly Rizza. Lewis, so entertaining as Det. Charlie Crews on TV’s “Life,” here is the picture of calm menace: no hair out of place, prison uniform immaculately pressed – a man in control until forced to confront the reality of his situation.

“The Escapist” won’t change the world but, for 102 minutes, it will pull you into a world from which you won’t want to escape.

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