Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

BA_Harrison Travelling cabaret singer Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) suffers engine trouble, breaking down in the woods during a rain-storm, but manages to find shelter at a nearby inn. Unfortunately, the owner of the establishment, Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), is completely crazy and, believing that the singer is his estranged wife, uses any means necessary to prevent his guest from leaving.I'd seen Calvaire (AKA The Ordeal) mentioned on a few 'most disturbing movies' lists, and comparisons to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Misery, Deliverance, Straw Dogs only furthered my curiosity. Having just finished watching the film, I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed.Once writer/director Fabrice Du Welz has established his film's unconventional premise, it seems as though he doesn't know what to do next, other than be weird for weird's sake. The plot certainly displays very little in the way of real development: Marc Stevens is subjected to humiliation, escapes, is caught again, then subjected to more humiliation, before escaping again. The story goes nowhere, ending abruptly without resolution, while the persistent, darkly humorous tone only serves to dilute any real horror that the situation might have otherwise had.As a fan of warped cinema, I didn't find Calvaire a total waste of time—any film with a random spot of bestiality and an impromptu freakish dance scene isn't totally worthless in my eyes—but it was far from the gruelling ordeal I had expected.

the-world-is It is simple, no story, no plot, bad photography, bad acting. To sum it up it is French cold and simple...It gives the genre a bad name, it is that bad. So bad it isn't even funny.Sex with animals, a bit of butt f*cking...do they really believe that that would make an impression of some kind? Man oh man, this one is done bad.The only good bit is the box office revenue. Go and look that up, you will laugh!I'm not a fan of the french movie industry, in general I think it lacks compassion and respect for the audience. The love for France is wasted on me.

jzappa Lounge singer Marc rounds the boonies of Belgium in a van crooning at assisted living facilities. On stage he's very debonair, with a sequined cape and blush. He sings ballads and seventysomethings and lonely nurses faint away under his enchantment. They propose themselves to him backstage, slip nude photos of themselves into his coat. Marc's stage presence is quite effective. But off stage he's hardly there, without feeling and consequence and whose vision of making it big is distant.Marc's road to his Christmas show takes him through the thickly wooded moorland in Walloon country. It's a murky, inhospitable place, a hinterland of rain-soaked forests and remote, decaying farms. When his van stops working, Marc makes his way to the sole inn nearby. It's a emphatically unadorned one run by an ex-stand-up comedian, the stout and heartbroken Bartel, played skillfully Jackie Berroyer. Bartel provides his subservient generosity and service in repairing the van in return for some companionship. Marc endures. He's got a choice? It's over a tranquil dinner that Bartel's manner starts to alter. Bartel tearily pleads Marc to sing a love ballad. Marc reluctantly accommodates and his performance is enough to persuade Bartel of what he's perhaps thought the whole time: Marc is his long lost unruly wife Gloria. Calvaire is an arduous, revolting and fully effective horror film from Belgium. Part Psycho, part Deliverance and all sinister, it is at the same time disconcerting and gripping. And what sells it is the realistic interest in nuance and the haunting direction of Fabrice Du Welz.This against-type psychological character film, shot on 16mm and printed into anamorphic format, is one of those uncommon, uncategorizable films that subsist at that frequently disquieting junction of gallows humor and horror. Like Roman Polanski's broadly hailed early films, Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire underscores the farce of our existential experience with the bleakest of humor utterly absent in modern American genre cinema. If this were an American film, the fiends at the hub of Calvaire would be misshapen, the result of inbreeding or radioactivity or chemical exposure, anything to separate them and their acts from human. But the monsters at the core of du Welz's Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre hybrid are as human as you get. And that makes the film all the more startling.Du Welz coalesces horror upon horror until this somewhat arguably surreal fable peaks in a sequence so alarming and morbidly engrossing that even Tobe Hooper would put his fingers over his eyes. It doesn't alleviate anything that cinematographer Benoit Debie is so excellent at depicting the churning, whirling insanity. Repulsive, sordid, unhinged, du Welz bizarre, forceful gut-wrencher is an uneasy tumble into insanity.

MARIO GAUCI One can be excused for expecting just a little bit too much from this Belgian horror opus. For starters, I had been highly impressed by my three previous encounters with Belgian fantasy on film – all of which happen to be the work of Harry Kumel i.e. THE WARDEN OF THE TOMB (1965), MALPERTUIS (1971) and, especially, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971); it features one of Jean Rollin's muses (ex-porn starlet Brigitte Lahaie) in the cast; besides, its original title of CALVAIRE promised a spatter of apocalyptic visuals.As it turned out, the film failed to deliver on all three counts: Kumel's reputation as Belgium's finest filmmaker is as safe as ever; Ms. Lahaie only has a tiny bit at the very beginning (as one of the singer protagonist's coterie of mature female admirers); and the Christ-like imagery barely registered. Having said that, watching THE ORDEAL was no ordeal {sic} in itself but, judged against other ultra-visceral contemporary Gallic horror fare, a surprisingly muted experience…and that is counting the by-now familiar view of villagers consorting with their farmyard animals.I cannot say that the inherent black comedy elements in the hero's weird predicament (stranded in the woods, he is forced to 'portray' the deranged former magician/innkeeper's straying wife…who also happened to be the local patriarch's lover!) were particularly pronounced either. Suffice it to say that the film's most disturbing moment for me was one of the most seemingly innocuous ones – seeing the 'normal' villagers at the bar go into their thoroughly nutty dance moves moments after having banished the 'sick' innkeeper from their midst!