Review of Calvaire (2005) by Paul Z — 12 Nov 2010

Lounge singer Marc rounds the boonies of Belgium in a van crooning at assisted living facilities. On stage he's very debonair, with a sequined cape and blush. He sings ballads and seventysomethings and lonely nurses faint away under his enchantment. They propose themselves to him backstage, slip nude photos of themselves into his coat. Marc's stage presence is quite effective. But off stage he's hardly there, without feeling and consequence and whose vision of making it big is distant.

Marc's road to his Christmas show takes him through the thickly wooded moorland in Walloon country. It's a murky, inhospitable place, a hinterland of rain-soaked forests and remote, decaying farms. When his van stops working, Marc makes his way to the sole inn nearby. It's a emphatically unadorned one run by an ex-stand-up comedian, the stout and heartbroken Bartel, played skillfully Jackie Berroyer. Bartel provides his subservient generosity and service in repairing the van in return for some companionship. Marc endures. He's got a choice? It's over a tranquil dinner that Bartel's manner starts to alter. Bartel tearily pleads Marc to sing a love ballad. Marc reluctantly accommodates and his performance is enough to persuade Bartel of what he's perhaps thought the whole time: Marc is his long lost unruly wife Gloria. Calvaire is an arduous, revolting and fully effective horror film from Belgium. Part Psycho, part Deliverance and all sinister, it is at the same time disconcerting and gripping. And what sells it is the realistic interest in nuance and the haunting direction of Fabrice Du Welz.

This against-type psychological character film, shot on 16mm and printed into anamorphic format, is one of those uncommon, uncategorizable films that subsist at that frequently disquieting junction of gallows humor and horror. Like Roman Polanski's broadly hailed early films, Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire underscores the farce of our existential experience with the bleakest of humor utterly absent in modern American genre cinema. If this were an American film, the fiends at the hub of Calvaire would be misshapen, the result of inbreeding or radioactivity or chemical exposure, anything to separate them and their acts from human. But the monsters at the core of du Welz's Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre hybrid are as human as you get. And that makes the film all the more startling.

Du Welz coalesces horror upon horror until this somewhat arguably surreal fable peaks in a sequence so alarming and morbidly engrossing that even Tobe Hooper would put his fingers over his eyes. It doesn't alleviate anything that cinematographer Benoit Debie is so excellent at depicting the churning, whirling insanity. Repulsive, sordid, unhinged, du Welz bizarre, forceful gut-wrencher is an uneasy tumble into insanity.