CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

kay900 The movie is slow paced and there is no a single moment where the movie manages to be terrifying. The movie introduces a sexual atmosphere from the beginning and builds upon it a sickening story and atmosphere. Although the movie is not terrifying it manages rather well to be disturbing and sick. The movie revolves around a singer travelling through the woods and suffering a car breakdown in a sparsely population region isolated from the world. Luckily he manages to find some lodgings where he can rest and get his car repaired. The movie portrays the events that unfold rather well. I would give the movie a skip if I was looking for something scary but the movie will fit right in if you are looking for something sickening.

Bob An Wait, wait,wait ... what is this film that I just saw ??????????????????????????? I can not say it is a horror, nor it is a comedy - though I guess there are elements of a dark comedy. This film is just surreal and out of the world.I would not say it is scary, but it is definitely uncomfortable at some moments. Perversion seems to lurk from every character in the film, but every single one of them! Though I am not sure about the main character of the film.French speaking movies are either total bore, or totally awesome or totally weird. This one is weird. A village full of mad, sexually perverted men! And mysterious femme fatale named Gloria if it was a woman at all!?It is bizarre film, can not say what I feel after watching it. And the end is puzzling. Did he escape? Or what was all that in the last minute? Or he is totally lost and will become mad like the others?My score for this??? I guess 7

Leofwine_draca CALVAIRE, aka THE ORDEAL, is a French film whose sole emphasis is on the brutal treatment suffered by the protagonist at the hands of various countryside-dwelling oddballs, the French equivalent of rednecks. It's a story of oppression and degradation that just so happens to be one of the most unpleasant films I've seen in a long time; not because it's particularly graphic, because it isn't, but because it just dwells on miserable, unpleasant characters doing even more miserable things.Be warned, this is a film that sets out to shock, and gets away with it by hiding under an 'arthouse' tag. Bestiality and male rape play a strong part, along with the exploitation of mental illness and the total subjugation of the human spirit. There are touches of mystery and intrigue in the first half, but the plot less second half piles on the misery and becomes gruelling for all the wrong reasons. There is no ending.The two most interesting things about CALVAIRE are a cameo role for French scream queen Brigitte Lahaie (starlet of many a Jean Rollin film, back in the day) and a surreal sequence in which bar patrons dance to a piece of appalling piano music. Other than that, it's a total dud.

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.