Calvaire (2004)
Directed by Fabrice Du Welz

Film Review

Alexandre Aja's Haute tension (2003) showed the world that a French filmmaker could deliver a survival horror film that is every bit as gripping and stylish as anything made by his American counterparts, but it has one crippling flaw: it is not remotely funny.  For his debut feature, the budding Belgian film director Fabrice Du Welz avoided making this fatal error and gave unsuspecting cinema audiences something far more satisfying and wholesome: a slick, blood-curdling horror film that makes you roll about on the floor in hysterics (well, almost).  Calvaire shows its influences with an almost shameless lack of modesty, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) being the classic horror film it most obviously draws on, but it gets away with this by being so outrageously off-the-wall and laughably sick.

Most of the film is a well-structured two-hander in which a dull musician from the city becomes ensnared and mercilessly tormented by the weirdest of country bumpkins who mistakes him for the reincarnation of his long-departed wife.  Jackie Berroyer manages to be both hilarious and terrifying as the latter, whilst Laurent Lucas proves to be an effective casting choice for the role of the victim we love to see put through Hell.  Right from the off, it is Berroyer's Pinteresque innkeeper who monopolises our sympathies, and we not only relish the humiliations and cruelties he subjects Lucas's character to (which include being forced into a tight floral dress and a friendly spot of crucifixion), we positively revel in them.  Calvaire is a film that reminds us that, no matter how we may pretend otherwise, there's a vicious little sadist in each and every one of us.  (Why else would anyone want to watch the Jeremy Kyle Show?)

The plot may not be particularly original - it is virtually a replay of Philippe Haïm's marvellously insane black comedy Barracuda (1997) - but that hardly matters if, like Du Welz, you come at it from a completely new angle and have a distinct lack of self-restraint and good taste.  Clearly far more interested in style than substance, Du Welz attacks his film with a kind of manic glee, raiding just about every American horror film made since the mid-1970s as he does so.  The film gets dizzyingly bizarre in places, with angrily whining pigs and zombie-like villagers (all male) adding to the general sense of disarray and hysteria.  One of the most stylish and deranged French-language horror films ever, Calvaire ultimately succeeds because at no point does it take itself too seriously.  A deliriously unhinged fantasy which looks suspiciously like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale that has got horribly out of control, it deserves a place in any horror film enthusiast's collection.

Film Synopsis

Marc Stevens is an itinerant singer who performs mainly for retirement homes.  After an engagement at a hospice is cancelled, his car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.  A stranger appears and takes him to an inn run by Monsieur Bartel.  Since his wife Gloria left him, the latter has been in an unbalanced state of mind.  To Marc's surprise, Bartel is convinced that he is the reincarnation of his wife.  Marc's surprise turns to horror when his host imprisons him and dresses him up in his wife's clothes...