Calibre

(spoiler free)

Before the lifeless light comes there is only a moment of colour. It buries Vaughn and Marcus in the bleak empty town full of empty people with enough of a Wicker Man vibe about them that it feels that all is truly cursed under the deathly trees in the barren Scottish Highlands.

‘Calibre’ plays out exactly as some divine, vengeful being would decide it would. The shots can’t be called by you, me or the characters within, the script is quick to tear down traditions from scene to scene – practically every quarter hour it’s subverting into something new – as the film tests the calibre of these men in newer, haunting and more unexpected ways.

But there is no divine being. It only feels so because Vaughn’s time with Marcus is relentlessly catastrophic, while his life at home is so far away. And that’s the hard part, life has a terrible way of getting itself swept up in someone else’s nightmare. That’s one thing when it comes to strangers and conventional narrative fiction, but the situation becomes stickier when you include the dynamic of loyalty between best friends.

This village is not safe. As cultish townspeople go, they’re not actually all that cultish. If anything they’re just bonded by their misery and economic impoverishment, so when the two unknowing tourists arrive (or “stalkers” as they’re eerily named), a strange friction comes as a reaction. It just so happens that Marcus has a job in finances. And so, two kinds of hunger become the tipping point of their downfall and defence; a dog fight over their value or their values.

And, what’s better than all of the previously mentioned is that as a block of entertainment, Calibre’s power comes from its focus, density and velocity. By the five minute mark they’re already in town, at fifteen minutes the accident bomb has already detonated. At ninety minutes I could’ve passed out limp from the exhaustion of the violence.

By the time of the accident we have a good idea of who Marcus and Vaughn are. Vaughn wants to be at home with his wife and kids and we don’t know enough about Marcus, other than he thinks life is unfair, he easily turns his emotions off to kill a deer (or to get or do whatever he needs or wants to benefit himself) and that he has no problem with being unfair himself or immorality (according to the villagers).

Where Vaughn and Marcus are concerned, the film is constantly squeezing the trigger pointed at their heads. Worse is that it’s their fingerprints on the gun.

Circumstance brings Vaughn and Marcus to retribution in a paralyzing conclusion. It’s a perfect punishment to cap the film. More powerful than gratifying revenge. It lingers. Being somehow ultimate without final. It weaponizes this idea that the ending of a life doesn’t die with the dead, it lives with the living. I warn you, I looked gaunt for a long while after seeing this.

Written by Joseph McFarlane

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Rating – 8.5/10

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