Four retired priests live in a Chilean beach town far away from anything and under the watchful gaze of their housekeeper, Sr Monica (Antonia Zegers). Together they walk, sing and fuss over a greyhound they run at local race meets. Their quiet collective is disrupted by the arrival of a new priest and one of his victims, a homeless, damaged man named Sandokan (Roberto Farías), who arrives in the front garden, listing, in graphic detail, the sexual abuses he suffered as an altar boy.
The incident precipitates the arrival of another priest, Fr Garcia (Marcelo Alonso), who has closed down other similarly purposed paedophile priest refuges. "You're one of those new priests," says Sr Monica, before shooting him a look that recalls the occasion when the similarly employed Mrs Doyle encountered a Teasmade in Father Ted.
It is not the fault of the screenplay, which Larraín co-wrote with Guillermo Caldaron and Daniel Villalobos, nor is it the doing of the actors – in particular, the director's wife, Zegers, provides a rigorous portrait of enablement – but for Irish viewers, The Club can play like a malignant echo of Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan's comic depiction of priesthood. It's unfortunate, too, that the evocative, but greatly overused Arvo Part's Fratres plays on the soundtrack.
The chills remain. Fr Garcia’s investigations yield wordy, inconsistent dodges, matched by the intrusive Sandokan’s ongoing recollections of rape, a sexualised “sacred” stream-of-consciousness that might make Joyce squirm.
Sergio Armstrong’s cinematography is a sinister fug.
The film's only depiction of intimacy is, unsurprisingly, a horror-show and the final scenes are as upsetting as anything the director has done. This is the same auteur that gave us the shit-smearing, Pinochet-era serial killer of Tony Manero (2008) and the mortician who buries his lover alive in Post Mortem (2010).
Prepare for feel-bad cinema. Larraín skilfully manipulates the viewer to feel sympathy for the priests and revulsion for their victim. As with Tony Manero, the film's allegorical dimension and the insistent provocation, is occasionally its undoing.
No one expects to cartwheel out of a theatre after a movie about monstrous predators, but it's hard to see how The Club could be any grimmer.
