Fabrice du Welz
Calvaire

Calvary.

The place where Jesus climbed to be crucified. Always associated with pain, penance, suffering. In this film, there is all the suffering that a man can experience.

Let's be clear right away. It is the most chilling film I have ever seen, and I can assure you I have seen many "strange" cinemas. This is the one that impressed me the most for its atmosphere, madness, insanity, violence, degradation of the human mind. Calvaire is something distressing and disturbing; it is the film that best describes human madness, the pain that a man can create when his mind is infested by demons greater than him. If you thought that "Gummo" was a strange and crazy film, then you have not seen Calvaire, you have not witnessed the protagonist's calvary. You have not witnessed his pain...

Directed by the Belgian debutant Fabrice du Welz, the director takes advantage of French support to create this absolutely unusual horror cinema. Once again, it is France producing a great horror film, as is happening more and more frequently lately (High Tension, Frontiers, Sheitan). As mentioned earlier, Calvaire is very strange and difficult to understand, not so much for the plot as for the real difficulty in assimilating very crude scenes that subtly use violence. There won't be rivers of hemoglobin; instead, it will be the suspense and madness of the characters that will leave you overwhelmed by what you will witness.

The singer Marc Stevens, while crossing a forest, will see his van (strange...) turn off and will stumble upon a figure searching for a little dog named Bella in the pouring rain at night... This very strange character will lead him to a nearby inn so that someone can be called to repair his van. Marc will encounter a kind innkeeper who will tell him that he, too, before being abandoned by his wife Gloria, was a humorist, defining himself as an artist just like Marc is, and for this reason, they can understand each other. Everything will become grotesque when the innkeeper named Bartel sees his ex-wife in the singer... A spiral of physical and psychological violence will begin, driving even the viewers to madness. There will be no shortage of slasher and violent scenes, but it will be the madness of Bartel and other figures that will create chaos.

Lost in an isolated village with a complete lack of a female figure, the inhabitants of the village will show all their ambiguity in what has become a cult scene of the film: the hunters' dance in the bar to the sound of a detuned piano, where the most total mental insanity will be displayed...

To demonstrate the most complete emotional and human annihilation, just mention the rape scene where the mocking grunt of a pig is heard in place of the victim's screams...

Set in a creepy location and framed by a dark and depressing cinematography, this Calvaire is a film where fear is not the dominant engine but rather madness in its most raw and real form. Don't expect sex scenes, jokes like "Cabin Fever", and similar nonsense because "Calvaire" has nothing human but is a transposition of madness onto film. You will be "drowned" by claustrophobic and excruciating environments, screams, and inhuman scenes, you will see children who seem to have come out of fairy tales left bewildered in the woods, witness a desecrating haircut, pigs gone mad that seem to have come straight out of Orwell's "Animal Farm".

I admit that after watching this film, I was truly affected. It is the only horror film that truly left me mortified, where you are left speechless by astonishing sequences where the protagonists are figures that would only be at home in an asylum.

Calvary. The hill on which Christ was crucified...