Calvaire Review

Directed by: Fabrice du Welz
Starring: Laurent Lucas, Jackie Berroyer and Philippe Nahon
Running Time: 94 minutes
Rated: R
Released: 2004
Language: French with English subtitles

Marc Stevens (Lucas) is a traveling entertainer on his way to his next gig in southern France. It's just a few days before Christmas and he finds himself stranded with a broke-down van in the remote, dark wooded Hautes Fagnes region of Liège. Begrudgingly, he has to stay in the only lodging available for miles and miles. There he meets the old innkeeper, Bartel (Berroyer), an old lonely man who confides in Marc about the wife that left him and the sad life of solitude he now leads.

Very soon, Marc realizes that he has stumbled into a nightmare from which he may never wake. Bartel's hospitality becomes less endearing and more and more psychotic by the hour.

I don't think I can fully express how utterly disappointed I was with this movie. There were certain aspects of it that gave it such a great potential that I think it actually made an even worse impression on me than if it had been awful throughout.

The concept of this film is quite scary. There are no fictitious monsters or demons roaming about the woods, just a bunch of scary, lonely, cult like, livestock-sodomizing, backwoods French rednecks. This film flows in the same vein as Deliverance and Wrong Turn in that: someone gets lost and the wrong people found them. I can't think of a much more frightening venture than that.

There were also a lot of really cool looking, stylish shots that gave this film a feel that was probably the only real reason I actually kept watching it. One of the more intense scenes was shot from a long overhead view that was pretty neat. It gave the viewer a more complete picture of the multiple things happening all at once.

Unfortunately, this movie fell short in such an important area that it left me completely disgusted. The main character, Marc was for all intents and purposes, completely unlikable and unidentifiable. At certain points in this movie, I found that I disliked him so much that I think I started cheering for the other side. You find yourself waiting throughout the entire 94 minutes for to grow a set and get Burt Reynolds on these freaks. Instead, he spends almost the entire second half of this movie crying and waiting for someone to save him

This film did a good job of filling itself with moments that make you feel uncomfortable watching it. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, as long as you give me something in return. I know that I can sometimes sound like a bit of a broken record when it comes to this. But, if you can't empathize with the character that you are spending the majority of this film with, the film is a failure.