The Club – Film Review by Frank L.

Director: Pablo Larraín
Writers: Guillermo Calderón, Pablo Larraín
Stars: Alfredo Castro, Roberto Farías, Antonia Zegers

In a windswept, remote settlement somewhere on the Chilean coast, four Roman Catholic priests in disgrace for a variety of failings live in what looks like a former holiday home supervised by a former nun, who has also fallen from grace. She is the housekeeper. Each has his own little obsessions, one of which includes owning a racing greyhound, and they all appear to be capable of rubbing along quite well together in this out-of-the-way back water. The tranquillity is interrupted by the arrival of another ordained newcomer, who does not survive long in this unusual community. His premature exit brings a further new arrival, a comparatively young, articulate, ordained apparatchik from some central authority within the organisation. He is going to investigate this small community. Life is not going to be the same.

Director Pablo Larraín through the device of the investigating priest delves in some considerable graphic detail into the pasts of the four. There is a sort of forced “confessional” quality to the stories as they are gradually revealed. The descriptions at times leave nothing to the imagination and there is a violence which underlies, mostly latent, but then to dramatic effect, albeit briefly, patent. Each of the actors make their characters entirely credible. This increases the overall sense of creepiness.

Larraín investigates a place where unwanted priests are effectively “lost” for the convenience of the church which they had previously served. Their stories are of those who have “fallen”. Larraín depicts a subterranean world where the practice of Christianity is a formula. However its principles impinge hardly at all on the four old priests or the housekeeping nun in their daily lives and certainly not on the investigating outsider. While the acting and the cinematography are all fine the grim inward-looking community depicted makes it a blessing when the film reaches its end after ninety seven minutes.