The Club

Chilean direc­tor Pablo Lar­raín led us so deeply into dark­ness with the black­ly com­ic one-two punch of Tony Manero and Post Mortem, that his pre­vi­ous fea­ture, No, the sto­ry of the adver­tis­ing cam­paign to oust Pinochet, almost felt like light relief. With his new film, The Club, he returns to the embrace the gloom once more, with a lm that makes for a fas­ci­nat­ing and con­trast­ing com­pan­ion piece to the recent Spot­light as it illu­mi­nates sex­u­al abus­es and cor­rup­tion with­in the Catholic church in scathing satir­i­cal style.

Locat­ed in grim Chilean fish­ing town La Boca, Larrain’s fifth fea­ture takes us inside a treat­ment house for var­i­ous­ly dis­graced cler­gy­men sim­i­lar to the one depict­ed in Spot­light as mere­ly an omi­nous exte­ri­or. It hous­es four priests: Fathers Vidal, Orte­ga, Ramirez and Sil­va (played by Alfre­do Cas­tro, Ale­jan­dro Goic, Ale­jan­dro Sievek­ing and Jaime Vadell) and an ex-nun, Móni­ca (a chill­ing Anto­nia Zegers), who acts as war­den. She’s sup­posed to ensure that their focus remains unremit­ting­ly on pen­i­tence, but the group have been indulging in a friv­o­lous, pro­hib­it­ed activ­i­ty by rais­ing a grey­hound and enter­ing him into local races.

This cushy exis­tence is thrown into chaos when the arrival of new priest Father Laz­cano (José Soza) attracts a dishev­elled accuser San­dokan (Rober­to Farias), who taunts the group with graph­ic descrip­tions of his abuse at the hands of Laz­cano and oth­ers. This leads to a vio­lent act which brings forth spir­i­tu­al direc­tor and psy­chol­o­gist Father Gar­cia (Marce­lo Alon­so). This hand­some, rather intense mod­erniser is vis­i­bly appalled by what he finds and he chal­lenges the res­i­dents with details of their crimes, putting each of them under his unfor­giv­ing micro­scope, with the film doing likewise.

Under the simul­ta­ne­ous scruti­ny of Larrain’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ser­gio Arm­strong, the char­ac­ters morph into twist­ed phys­i­cal grotesques that fit with their hideous crimes and gen­er­al remorse­less­ness. Yet the film’s washed-out, melan­cholic look also has the effect of dulling the group’s vil­lainy so that they often appear pathet­i­cal­ly, some­times humor­ous­ly human as they bunch ner­vous­ly togeth­er, balk at Father Garcia’s accu­sa­tions and his sug­ges­tion that they might be crim­i­nals, cow­er from the ugly truths that San­dokan hollers from the street, and as Father Vidal makes cring­ing attempts to ingra­ti­ate him­self to a group of young surfers.

Like San­dokan, The Club takes a brave­ly head-on, but hard­ly obvi­ous, approach to the sub­ject mat­ter; it may be a mar­vel of visu­al char­ac­ter, with a dra­mat­ic score that gives it the flavour of a tragedy, but it’s cer­tain­ly not pret­ty in a the­mat­ic sense, with the bru­tal, relent­less­ly explic­it dia­logue (from Lar­rain and co-writ­ers Guiller­mo Calderón and Daniel Vil­lalo­bos) an acknowl­edge­ment that we’ve got to ful­ly recog­nise the dif­fi­cult-to-hear issue of child abuse, in order to stop the per­pe­tra­tors slip­ping back into the safe­ty of the shad­ows. It has plen­ty to say to a church that effec­tive­ly and repeat­ed­ly ignores the prob­lem, har­bour­ing its trans­gres­sors only just out of sight, and to the reform­ers who may be all talk. By virtue of its courage The Club ren­ders itself essential.