paulmartin177

Well, this was a disappointment. Being a fan of strange and offbeat movies I was expecting good things from this, or at the very least something frightening or disturbing (I like being disturbed which makes me...well, disturbed). I saw Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' and Aja's 'Switchblade Romance' recently, two rather different films but both of which nevertheless satisfied my appetite for being taken somewhere alien, scary and new. 'Calvaire' (English title: 'The Ordeal', hence my summary above) however simply tried my patience and left it unrewarded. Sure, it was pretty weird, but in a way it was too deliberately weird; weird for the sake of weirdness alone. Something like 'The League of Gentlemen' is weird but the weirdness has a deeper point: it makes it FUNNY! 'Calvaire', in my humble opinion, is neither particularly scary, funny, unsettling or thought-provoking (unless "What is the point of this film?" is a thought worth provoking), and hardly entertaining at all. On the plus side, and as a way of saying something positive about the film (as all films have at least something good about them): it's quite short...