The Club
Studio: Music Box Films
Directed by Pablo Larraín
Feb 22, 2016
Web Exclusive
Golden Globe nominated feature The Club is a dark, somber look at the more sinister side of the Catholic Church. In a small, remote Chilean village, there is a house inhabited by four men and a woman. They’re not related by blood, nor have any of them sought out this place of residence. Rather, the reason for their cohabitation is the shameful dark secret that binds them all. While wearing the habit, each one of them committed heinous and unspeakable acts, most of them against children. Their penance, their punishment, is life in this small house, with no outside contact or communication. They are to spend the rest of heir lives in remorseful prayer. For a while, the group has managed to find a sort of collective, quiet balance in their disgraced existence. All of that changes, however, when a new priest shows up, followed shortly by the man he routinely abused decades ago. An incident at the house soon draws the attention of another priest sent to determine the fate of the despicable house, which both he and the church intend to dismantle.
Director Pablo Larraín crafts an intricate study of fraught and troubled characters in The Club. The titular entity’s members are in total denial about their atrocious crimes, and yet they experience no hesitation when casting blame on the newcomers to their gloomy abode. Larraín’s tale, co-written by the director, Guillermo Calderón, and Daniel Villalobos, offers an interesting glimpse into the psychology of the monsters, who so flagrantly abuse their power and the trust of religious congregants. However, the film veers pretty far off course in the last half hour, growing gratuitously nefarious in a way that doesn’t necessarily ring true. A dog racing subplot that at first manifests as a distraction for the cooped up priests evolves into a malicious and gratuitously violent affair that detracts from the introspective nature of the rest of the film. The Club is—or should be—about atonement and acceptance of one’s past crimes and penance. Instead, it choses to become a showcase of monsters, men and women who subjugated the defenseless to pain and suffering in the past, and continue to do so today. Perhaps that’s the point. The residents of the “clubhouse” are there for a reason; even before they were guilty of their crimes, they belonged there. But the direction the film takes in its final 30-minutes is an inorganic one. Perhaps it’s the right route to take, but it nonetheless undermines the intricacies of once pious pillars of their community felled by their pedophilia and other transgressions.
www.musicboxfilms.com/the-club-movies-127.php
Author rating: 6/10
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February 23rd 2016
6:57pm
I love the fact that you start by saying that this movie shows the “sinisters side” of the Catholic Church.
As opposed to the standard side shown by the movie “spotlight”, that the Catholic Church was running the largest organized child sex crime syndicate in the history of the Western world.