UNITED STATES
Hi-Def Digest
Posted by Philip Brown – February 24, 2016
‘The Club’
Movie Rating:
3.5
Complex, thought-provoking, daring and bleakly funny in the most disturbingly possible ways, Pablo Larrain’s ‘The Club’ is a savage little intimate drama.
It’s also a peculiar companion piece of sorts to this year’s awards darling ‘Spotlight’. Anyone who has seen that movie will recall the sequence in which a father discovers that a house on his street was used to shelter priests accused of child molestation. Larrain’s film takes place inside one of those houses and tackles all the icky subject matter therein head on.
The film opens by gradually introducing viewers to the four aging priests and one creepily perky nun sharing a house in a small community. Their days are dull, spent mostly in hiding. Their only connection to the outside world is a dog that they train to race with great success. They watch the race from a distance through binoculars and squirrel away their winnings for unknown purposes. Things are shaken up when a stranger (Roberto Farias) arrives. He screams about being molested as a child in graphic detail outside the house. Eventually, one of the hidden priests commits suicide. That event prompts the arrival of a new priest (Marcello Alonso), sent to interrogate and challenge these lost souls in the hopes of getting some sort of confession and doling out penance. In other words, the movie doesn’t exactly occur within a happy space, and you can be certain that it isn’t marching towards a redemptive ending either.
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