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Calvaire (2005)
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Reviews Counted:21
Fresh:7
Rotten:14
Average Rating:5.3/10
Theatrical Release:Aug 11, 2006 Limited
Synopsis: After a late-night gig, a lost lounge singer whose car has broken down stumbles into a terrible and secluded hotel where a series of atrocious--and increasingly violent--events take place.
Starring: Laurent Lucas, Jackie Berroyer, Brigitte Lahaie, Philippe Nahon
Starring: Laurent Lucas, Jackie Berroyer, Brigitte Lahaie, Philippe Nahon
Director: Fabrice Du Weltz
Director: Fabrice Du Weltz
Screenwriter: Romain Protat, Fabrice Du Weltz
Studio: Palm Pictures
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Reviews for Calvaire
a surrealist fairy tale bringing gothic glee to its meditations on performance and passion.
A glossy rehash that's far less interesting and frightening than the classics upon which it's unimaginatively modeled.
if you've got a black sense of humor you might just find yourself laughing down the vomit.
Du Welz has definite visual-dramatic talent. (Calvaire was a Cannes festival pick.) But, like Norman Bates' car, he need to get pulled out of the swamp.
What sells this movie is the realistic attention to detail and the bravura direction of Fabrice Du Welz, who draws a gut-wrenching performance from Lucas.
So dead-set on being disturbing that it ends up tripping over its own hobbled feet and evoking fewer gasps than curdled little giggles.
By the time it reaches its final act, the film rivals its American counterparts in intensity if not quite in explicit violence.
Naming one character after cult director Paul Bartel is obvious enough, but why saddle the other with the moniker of a notorious '70s porn star?
Director-co-writer Fabrice du Welz has taken a clichéd premise and infused it with a stylish perversity that should have horror fans squealing with delight.
Director Fabrice Du Welz doesn't reinvent the backwoods-freakshow formula, but there is something undeniably entertaining about violent psychos who are also committed art lovers.
Often more haunting and disturbing for what you don't see than for what you do.
Directed by the newcomer Fabrice du Welz, the Belgian horror film Calvaire is pompous, but not without talent or shivers.
The very notion that movies about torture are considered 'horror,' and are more profitable now per foot of celluloid than any other type of independent film, is what's qualmy.
While The Ordeal can't pass itself off as an art-house horror about the nature of love among the cannibals, it sometimes has a sick sexual frisson that resonates.
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