Pablo Larraín/ Chile/ 2015/ 97 mins

On Blu-Ray/ DVD Mon 30 May 2016

You could be forgiven for assuming that Pablo Larraín’s fifth film is a Chilean remake of Father Ted.  Four priests reside in a purgatorial-looking house on a coastline of Stygian desolation, attended to by a vaguely sinister shrew of a housekeeper.  It’s apparent that they have all committed some transgression, and been sent there, but whether as genuine penance or as a cover-up is unclear.

When a dishevelled fisherman appears outside the house, reciting a traumatically detailed litany of abuses he has suffered at the hands of new arrival, it’s horrifically apparent that the sins committed by these men of the cloth go far beyond ‘money just resting in accounts’.

The Club feels thematically similar to John Michael McDonagh’s wonderful Calvary, but in place of the blackly comic tone of that film is a horrendously bleak, claustrophobic swamp of a picture.  It is genuinely gruelling to spend time in the company of these men, who are not only guilty of the most awful abuses of power and trust, but who are shifty, defiant and deluded in the face of interrogation.  These men are monsters, of course, but they are intensely human monsters, and Larraín never completely retracts the hope of redemption.  They can’t simply be dismissed as evil.  It’s hard not to feel at least a tiny needle of sympathy as one of the men, now stricken with dementia, has his nappy changed; even with the knowledge of his past crimes.  Yet when Fr. Vidal, played to perfection by Larraín regular Alfredo Castro, attempts to pass off his predatory relationship with a choirboy as the purest kind of love, it can’t help but cause an outraged shiver down the spine.

Such systemic abuse of power is a theme central to Larraín’s work. The deplorable behaviour of the Catholic Church, in not only allowing generations of paedophiles to proliferate their ranks, but in attempting to sweep all evidence under various ecumenical carpets, was in this case simply another vile strand of the criminal Junta of Thatcher’s chum Augusto Pinochet.   For the director, it isn’t only on a governmental level that corruption, avarice and perversion are rife; but in every instrument of societal control.  By drawing implicit comparison between the old Chilean Junta, and the global Catholic Church, Larraín warns us that none of our own institutions should be trusted.

The Club should not be approached lightly.  It is incredibly verbally explicit in its treatment of its subject, and is necessarily hugely upsetting.  It is also very pessimistic in its depiction of a rotten organisation.  However, it is wonderfully made, and sizzles with a righteous fury that practically warps the screen.  Too few filmmakers dare to set truth against power in such a way, but films like The Club and the recent Spotlight are bright lights in the darkness.