Often imitated, never bettered, no horror film has ever managed to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle delirious lunacy of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. A lot of hapless teenagers and idiot hippies have followed in those footsteps in the years following, but none have managed to get further than the dinner table and a chittering madman in a butcher’s apron.
Until, that is, 2004’s Calvaire (The Ordeal, in English, or a variation on ‘fuck,’ or ‘bloody hell,’ if you want to be Quebecois about it). Adjacent to the early noughties’ French extremist movement (see also: Martyrs, Inside, Haute Tension), Fabrice Du Welz’s backwoods horror film is surprisingly lacking its peers’ excessive gore but remains the most troubling of them all.
When his van breaks down in rural Belgium, cheesy crooner Marc (Laurent Lucas) takes refuge in a remote inn, run by the strange but seemingly harmless Bartel (Jackie Berroyer). Only Marc’s simpering countenance unlocks something in the lonely old farmer, who sees something in the singer that he previously recognised in his wife. Uh-oh.
A sucker punch, a haircut, and a length of rope later, Marc finds himself the guest of honour at an increasingly unhinged Christmas with Belgium’s own League of Gentlemen. Here the slow burn reaches peak burn, and narrative gives way to surrealist dance routine, heavy-handed symbolism (the crucifixion is so on-the-nose as to be up it) and all manner of screeching, screaming, and snot-nosed snivelling.
Now remastered, the imagery pops, and the Belgian countryside looks more chilly and foreboding than ever – but it’s in the sound design where Calvaire truly unsettles. From Marc’s miserable crying to the squealing of a tortured pig, it’s a hard, almost unbearable listen – and the closest any film has ever come to capturing the insanity of Texas Chain Saw’s dinner table sequence.
CALVAIRE is out now on digital platforms.
