Calvaire (2005)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Don't listen to the negative reviews

A Masterpiece!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Travelling cabaret singer Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) suffers engine trouble, breaking down in the woods during a rain-storm, but manages to find shelter at a nearby inn. Unfortunately, the owner of the establishment, Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), is completely crazy and, believing that the singer is his estranged wife, uses any means necessary to prevent his guest from leaving.I'd seen Calvaire (AKA The Ordeal) mentioned on a few 'most disturbing movies' lists, and comparisons to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Misery, Deliverance, Straw Dogs only furthered my curiosity. Having just finished watching the film, I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed.Once writer/director Fabrice Du Welz has established his film's unconventional premise, it seems as though he doesn't know what to do next, other than be weird for weird's sake. The plot certainly displays very little in the way of real development: Marc Stevens is subjected to humiliation, escapes, is caught again, then subjected to more humiliation, before escaping again. The story goes nowhere, ending abruptly without resolution, while the persistent, darkly humorous tone only serves to dilute any real horror that the situation might have otherwise had.As a fan of warped cinema, I didn't find Calvaire a total waste of time—any film with a random spot of bestiality and an impromptu freakish dance scene isn't totally worthless in my eyes—but it was far from the gruelling ordeal I had expected.

Days before Christmas, entertainer Marc Stevens gets stuck at in a remote wood in the swampy region of Liège, after his van breaks down. A man who's looking for a lost dog leads takes to a desolate inn, and the owner gives Marc a room for the night. Next day, the innkeeper, promises to fix the van, asks that Marc not visit the nearby village, but goes through Marc's things whilst he takes a walk. That night, the innkeeper laments his wife's having left him, and by next day, Marc is in a nightmare that may not end......The kidnap victim thriller isn't a fresh idea, it's been done to death, taking someone and pretending that they are someone else, but this one is a little more darker, a little more moody, and the fact that the kidnapper may be the most normal person Marc runs into, adds to the bewilderment.The villagers are absolutely bonkers, or are we seeing these people through the eyes of the innkeeper? Or do they even exist, and are just part of the innkeepers imagination?But the fundamental aspect of the film is the torture that Marc endures, and the humility he goes through with the innkeeper, that makes the film as intense as it is.But it's also the strange set pieces in the film and the quieter moments that really get to the viewer, such as the resident who comes on to Marc, or the scene in the bar after the innkeeper says his peace.Its a difficult film to watch, but its worth watching, but it will leave you feeling a bit low..

But i'll do just to warning whoever is going to watch this piece of nonsense. I'll do because i believed the positive reviews and thanks to them I lost almost 88 minutes uselessly.Right on the start I started to have a bad feeling. When a director spent the first three minutes showing a singer singing a boring song, right there, i told to myself: "this movie is going to be a waste of time". And that it was.A story you completely do not care about. The plot could had be filmed in five minutes; a "guy", cause a van damage, ended up in a "crazy" community in a nowhere place; all the rest is a completely long and stupid manner to make from an absurd and poor idea a full movie. The acting, the movie, the sounds, all is tedious long and irritating. The boring scenes of crazy people singing are useless if not to lengthen the movie. I had to use the forward button many times to jump those parts. There is not horror to be afraid of, there is not suspense, there isn't thrilling, there was nothing at all but absurdity and craziness, and not in a interesting manner, in a completely absence of ideas. You can't see neither the effort to try to give to this movie a minimum of intriguing. You expect something to make some sense or interesting and you wait in vane. Also the final, in any way you look at it, doesn't make any sense connected to the whole movie. Despite i do like horror genre movie, surreal or not, this is not even a movie to me. Next time i'll be more careful to read the negative reviews.You have be warned.0/10

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.