![]() Its ability to sustain a mood is incredible. It makes you want to run into the hills, explore forgotten glades. The opening shot over an expanse of yellow-capped trees is particularly gorgeous, full and lush and just ever so slightly menacing. It makes the most of its setting – West Lothian and Lanarkshire sub for the Highlands – with lots of lingering images of rust-coloured hills and moist, verdant pines. It’s a beautiful film, too, for all the grime. At its heart, this is a psychological piece, despite drawing on various horror tropes. It’s worth noting that despite the nastiness of the story and the film’s unflinching refusal to let up on the nature of its central crime, this is no torture porn – the violence is most often implied, not shown, and the horror is in what people are willing to do to one another, not the physical acts themselves. It does gesture toward the creepy locals angle – with a tense dinner, in which you’re not sure just who knows what, or how much (Tony Curran is on great form as a sort of village head) with talk of a solstice festival (‘it’s just a piss-up and a bonfire these days, really’) with a small kid who stares mutely and unblinking at the protagonists from upper-storey windows with a general them-and-us hostility – but no matter how creepy they may be, it’s Marcus and Vaughn who did wrong. But the film won’t allow us to forget that Marcus and Vaughn have killed a child, at least in part through their negligence, and what’s worse, have deliberately attempted to cover it up, depriving the community of the chance to grieve and causing it to launch a town-wide manhunt. ![]() ![]() ![]() Bang! Time for a romp.Īgain, this could be the set-up for a light-hearted caper, or a creepy locals story. From then on, it’s what in a lighter film might be a comedy of errors, as Marcus and Vaughn endeavour to hide the body and cover up their location, before realising they’re stuck in the town for the weekend while they wait on repairs to their car. Vaughn finds one, lines up a shot, pauses to take a breath, fires – and the deer moves its head, revealing a young boy standing right behind it, who falls down dead. The next morning, with Vaughn heavily hungover and Marcus snorting coke to take the edge off, they head out to the woods to stalk deer. They pitch up in the small town of Culcarran and meet assorted locals at a bar near their hotel, getting good and drunk together. Vaughn (Jack Lowden) and Marcus (Martin McCann) are old school friends off on a hunting trip in the Highlands as a sort of final get-together before Vaughn becomes a dad. And it doesn’t let the protagonists off the hook and try to pretend they’re good guys, really: it makes us stare at them across its hour-and-a-half runtime and contemplate what it is they’ve done. It’s fuck-up after fuck-up, turning an already very bad thing into something much, much worse. Where most films would use that as the inciting incident, leading to a fun road movie, a slide into vice, or a big action extravaganza, Calibre keeps its characters in the immediate aftermath of the decision and rubs their noses in it. You know: the gun goes off in a tussle, someone ends up dead, and instead of calling the police, they try to cover it up, making things ten times worse for themselves. Instead, conflict and extreme tension in Calibre arise from one terrible moment – and the horrifying (but crucially understandable) decisions that follow in its wake.Calibre is a sort of extended meditation on the kinds of terrible decisions characters in films so often make. Something of a fresh spin on a classic concept, this is not a straightforward ‘evil yokels menace innocent city slickers’ story, even if it plays with those archetypes. The film touches on these issues with nuance but impact many people will recognise the problems of a village where work is scarce, development non-existent and the young are restless and looking to escape. A man seeking to save his community – which is facing growing economic and social challenges, as the old businesses die away. The ever-excellent character actor Tony Curran is fantastic in the film as genuinely friendly, sincere local linchpin Logan. Sinister pagan rituals afoot? Or merely a local “p*** up” at work? (Photo: Wellington Films/Netflix) A traditional ‘pagan’ folk festival is about to take place.īut while King notes that echoes of The Wicker Man can be felt, and Deliverance’s influence is also clearly present, Calibre’s power lies in its refusal to bow to certain horror stereotypes. Two outsiders, one cocky and reckless, the other more straight-laced and shy, roll up to a remote village in the middle of nowhere. You may think you’ve seen this story before.
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