The Club

For my money the movie that doesn’t neatly define itself before it closes, that leads the viewer into a blind alley and leaves them there, is almost always the movie that lives longer in the mind… Larraín has made such a film, a work steeped in Catholicism’s processes of penance and mysterious images that internalizes the coexistence of Church-sanctioned values of tolerance, compassion, and forgiveness with the unforgivable sins that have occurred under its watch and within its walls.

In a film permeated by a sense of doom, Larraín’s expressionistic use of lens distortion entraps the characters, suggesting that there is no place to hide when the truth erupts like vomit. But what makes The Club stand out so vividly from other recent depictions of religious corruption is its unabashed, impartial humanism. This is a film about the deepest yearnings of the soul and the eternal conflict between self-assertion and self-denial.

That Larraín has filmed these priests’ confessions literally straight to camera is both confrontational and hugely effective. When I interviewed him during the LFF he suggested that, rather than confronting the viewer, these close-ups invite a certain compassion for the ‘curitas’ (or ‘little priests’, as the victim refers to them, in a deeply unsettling mix of affection and belittlement).