Calibre (2018)

Because his fiancée's new pregnancy signals something like the beginning of responsible grown-up life, and realistically for quite a few years less time for swanning off with his friends, to him, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) is going on a weekend trip into the Scottish Highlands with his best friend Marcus (Martin McCann). It’s going to be a hunting trip, no less. Vaughn does not actually have much interest in shooting helpless animals but Marcus insists, and it’s pretty clear the latter man has been the dominant partner in their friendship since they met at boarding school, a place where you’d expect Marcus with his clear rich boy entitlement to have felt rather at home, and Vaughn not so much.

After a night of drinking and flirting with the female populace of the village they have booked rooms for the weekend in, or a bit more than just flirting in Marcus’s case, off to the hunt they go. From now on, things will go very badly indeed, for Vaughn accidentally shoots and kills a little boy. The following confrontation with the child’s desperate father ends up with Marcus killing him, too, in what he clearly honestly believes was the bodily defence of his friend. To the audience, the situation is rather more ambiguous; it’s a clear possibility that Vaughn had managed to talk the man down already when his friend shoots.

In any case, from here on out, Marcus takes control of the situation, with little resistance from the just as shell-shocked Vaughn, and the two start on a series of increasingly horrible, and just plain wrong decisions, starting with the idea of burying the bodies and (badly) pretending nothing happened.

Matt Palmer’s Made for Netflix thriller is a rather wonderful example of intelligent filmmaking, based on a script – also by the director – that particularly impressed me with its measuredness, its ability to escalate a situation yet to find the point to stop before things, characters and situations become too over the top.

So Marcus is certainly a bit of an entitled prick – certainly someone I’d dislike heartily in real life - and Vaughn a bit of a wet blanket, but both are so in believable measures, keeping their friendship a concrete thing between two believable and concrete men instead of an abstract or a cliché only there to drive a movie. And the villagers, as country people in horror films and thrillers are wont to, certainly have their own ways of going about things, but again, the film finds exactly the right spot just before they turn into crazy backwoods folk and portrays their actions as consequence of the things they go through.

In fact, one of the film’s subtle arguments seems to be that part of the situation evolves like it does exactly because our protagonists view these people – even an obvious man of distinction like Logan McClay (Tony Curran, as off-handedly wonderful as usual) – as villagers, these curious humans city people meet when they are on vacation, not quite like us, and therefor not quite evoking the kind of empathy and respect they might afford those they meet in their daily lives. That’s not to say there isn’t resentment coming from the other side, too, though it mostly is the sort of resentment provoked by random outsiders just trampling through your life without even seeming to notice when they do harm.

This kind of thoughtfulness, the willingness to let things and people be complicated runs through every aspect of Calibre’s script. However, it also manages to be just a wonderfully effective genre film, if you like your thrillers quietly tense and subtly tight, that is, for while there is indeed something of a violent climax, much of the immense tension of the film is based on careful observation and consideration of people and situations and seldom built on obvious set pieces. That’s not a criticism, of course, it’s a sign of subtlety, and while I do love loud and visually stylized thrillers, subtlety is not a bad thing, especially if it’s realized so well.
It’s also remarkable how little interest Palmer shows in twists, something that now seems to be a mandatory element of most thriller and horror films, often to their detriment; instead of twists, Calibre has actual organic plot developments, the feeling of a noose pulling tighter, and things deteriorating. I rather prefer that.


I haven’t really said much about the film’s technical aspects. That’s not because they are not worth mentioning, but because Palmer’s direction is so self-assured and at the same time so disinterested in pointing at itself, that the film’s highly effective framing of scenes, the pointed editing, and the often beautiful camera work of DP Márk Györi, as well as the through the bank excellent acting, just become part of the gestalt of Calibre.

Three Films Make A Post: They Can Be Slaughtered Like Any Beast

Devil (2010): Given that that I’m one of the few people who rather enjoyed director John Erick Dowdle’s As Above, So Below, I was quite willing to give this one a chance despite it being tainted by a “story by M. Night Shyamalan” credit. Alas, while it’s slickly directed, this has a plot of utmost stupidity (did you know the devil likes to arrange elevators getting stuck so he can harvest the souls of sinners in them?), cartoon-level characters, and – in full Shyamalan form even though the man didn’t even write the damn script – at times plays like a propaganda movie for a particularly unhinged form of Christianity, where you can tell the devil is present because then toasts fall with the marmalade side down (seriously). And while that’s certainly good for a laugh or two, it’s not a basis for a film that quite obviously wants to be taken very very seriously indeed.

Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015): If you’re in the market for something that makes some of the Resident Evil movies look like art, this misbegotten, shot-in-Canada, videogame movie might be just the right thing for you. There are some moments of competent filmmaking here, and even some fun scenes, but mostly, this is one of those films that just can’t decide if it wants to play its zombies for laughs or for terror and certainly isn’t well-written enough to successfully do both at the same time. This is a film that just can’t decide if it wants to be knowingly silly or dramatic, and so ends up being neither.

Male lead Jesse Metcalfe is atrocious and the rest of the cast – despite Virginia Madsen and Dennis Haysbert earning their pay checks – isn’t much better. Add to that a tedious length of nearly two hours wasted on a plot that probably would have worked for seventy minutes, and you have exactly the crappy videogame zombie movie you expected going on.

In the Dark Half (2012): This on a very other hand is a wonderful exploration of sadness and loss through fairy mythology and folk rituals with subtle, often eerie direction by Alastair Siddons and a script by Lucy Catherine that’s so good, even its plot twist works, which it of course also does because it is actually part of what the film has to say and not just a stupid gimmick.


The acting by Jessica Barden, Tony Curran and Lyndsey Marshal is just as impressive, and the film as a whole just doesn’t get a more in-depth write-up all its own from me because it would mostly consist of me making the blogging version of cooing noises, as well as a few stifled sobs.

In short: Red Road (2006)

Warning: there will be structural spoilers!

Jackie (Kate Dickie) is working as a CCTV operator in Glasgow. Apparently, she lives a lonely life, a fortnightly appointment (one really doesn’t want to call it a date) with a married man for some of the most loveless sex I can imagine looking like the only regular social encounter in her life.

Things change when she sees a man we will later learn is named Clyde (Tony Curran) on one of her monitors. Clyde must have been involved in some sort of crime against her – a rape would be the most obvious assumption – so Jackie at first seems panicked and desperate. However, she quickly begins to do more than panic, watching Clyde, following him in person, and getting close enough for him to touch, or for her to touch him.

Andrea Arnold’s Red Road is apparently part of some kind of filmic round-robin in which Arnold and two other directors used the same group of characters, but I don’t think one needs to know that or have seen the other films to be able to appreciate the film as what it is: a study of alienation and fear; a film about recovering from loss and guilt; and a brilliant revenge flick that doesn’t play by the rules of its genre most of the time.

Despite a colour scheme dominated by grey that suggests some sort of nearly documentary approach to filmmaking, Arnold is incredibly good at a lot of techniques very much unlike a documentary. There’s expressive editing that mirrors the mental state of Jackie, a camera that seems calm and distanced until it isn’t anymore, and little moments when the greyness and the drabness (that is as much outside of Jackie as it is inside of her) subtly clear a little. Further adding weight to the film is the strength and complexity of Dickie’s and Curran’s performances in the roles of two very difficult and very complex persons who are emotionally close in a way that is so ironic it is nearly perverse.

The film’s structure is admirable – as well as highly disciplined - including a revelation about the actual nature of the relation between Jackie and Clyde I wish scriptwriters trying to use plot twists would take a look at and learn from. Not, mind you, that it feels like a plot twist (which is more often than not a cheap surprise effect) – it is a revelation of truth that is also built to shake an audience’s assumptions.


As it goes with films quite this good, I don’t really think talking Red Road up – at least my way of doing it – does the film the justice it deserves. It’s a film to be watched with an open mind, with patience and with the greatest attention; to me, it felt very much like a revelation.