Critics reviews

Nobody is likely to hail Larraín as a great visual stylist. His Scope compositions are unadventurous and his film language and editing syntax are fundamentally orthodox. The climactic crosscutting between two acts of violence seems to spring from an impulse to produce a 'punchy' finale; all it actually brings to the film is a redundant hint of melodrama. But The Club is written and acted with great skill and remarkable sensitivity to the warped thought processes of paedophiles and their victims.

What to make of a movie like this? The Club isn't really about molestation or politics so much as it is about the mysterious netherworld of guilt, shame, fear, and righteousness, and how those things sometimes become tangled together. It's occasionally beautiful, but just as often stomach-turning. You watch it at a remove, but still with a combination of pity and horror and regret. Maybe that's the idea. For a brief, agonizing moment, you share the spiritual quicksand with these disgraced men.

The Club is Larraín's angriest, most off-putting film since Tony Manero, which says nothing about how the director's developing: he's scheduled to next knock out two biopics (of Pablo Neruda and, leaping to Hollywood, Jackie Kennedy). For now, The Club stands as an end to (or least pause in) Larraín's examinations of his country during and after Pinochet, again demonstrating that the past is still present in Chile while widening the scope of his indictment.

The film isn't interested in penetrating too far past the organizational smokescreen its ever-on-guard priests are hiding behind, and we don't learn a whole lot about Farías's victim save for the fact that he's perpetually wasted. Perhaps the great extent of the self-protectiveness and the dissipation is the point, but it's nonetheless frustrating that the characters here seem to stay mostly under wraps—the movie winds up feeling like a kind of cover-up in itself.

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.

Once Father Garcia (Marcelo Alonso) arrives at La Boca as the Vatican's dispatched investigator and new live-in member, The Club ditches its substantial craftsmanship and strange sense of humor for progressively ugly developments that shift Larraín's thematic interests toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.

The tightly patterned story has a musical structure that underscores the drama's starkest, deepest conflicts. Only a clichéd view of the traumatized Sandokan vitiates the film's outraged power.

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).

The Club is strongly dependent on art direction, to the point of being distracting in almost every scene. Like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker to whom Larraín resembles in his taste for ostentatious cruelty and sordidness, the film proceeds as a series of arbitrary events that, after the death of the movie's sole nice character (Rayo, the dog), results in a compromise between Father García and the rest of the troupe.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain's The Club, which was awarded the Grand Jury Prize, focused on a group of pedophile Catholic priests, sequestered in a rural region of Chile, with a mixture of revved-up polemical outrage and scattershot symbol mongering.

Never failing to bring us steadfast lessons of the past and always holding those who hide the truth under lock and key to account, Larraín has created another masterful piece of cinema. And it will haunt us, just like the truth it echoes, for years to come.