![]() ![]() The film’s secret weapon may be gifted editor Chris Wyatt (“God’s Own Country,” “’71”), who keeps the pace brisk but also unpredictable, often choosing to linger on quiet, conversation-driven scenes that reveal their teeth in their own good time. Györi, in his highest-profile assignment since Peter Strickland’s “Katalin Varga,” works wonders with the weather-saturated, bracken-tangled Scottish mountainscape, alternately playing up its menace or magnificence from scene to scene. If nothing here is exactly new, it’s the sheer, breathless precision and momentum of “Calibre’s” assembly that keeps it startling. He has a wily, wicked foil in Irish star McCann (following his lead turn in “The Survivalist,” not an actor afraid to be in the wars), and it’s their fraught but convincing bond that holds our sympathy even through their most reprehensible actions. An Olivier Award-winning stage actor now settling into a quietly potent, empathetic screen presence, Lowden impressively holds it together through all these key changes, even when his character emphatically does not. The fallout from this horrific accident proceeds in ways that are both grimly inevitable and gut-knottingly uncertain, as the villagers gradually sense something amiss - and Palmer’s poised Hitchcockian tension tactics give way to a more visceral rush of horror. With a dead boy suddenly on their hands, the shell-shocked men somehow worsen matters in self-defensive panic, with Marcus’s macho rashness and Vaughn’s passivity making for a precipitous pile-up of bad decisions as they cover their tracks.Īll that, and the film’s just getting started. However, when a movie is told this effectively with a Hitchcockian flair-credit has to be given to Chris Wyatt’s masterful editing and composer Anne Nikitin simple but oppressive score-it’s hard not to be engrossed in Calibre.Yet when the lads, a little worse for wear, head into the woods the next morning, catastrophe strikes: After training his rifle on an obliging deer, Vaughn shoots, only for an interloping child hiker to get fatally caught in the firing line. Truly though, the story isn’t something we haven’t seen before. However, the more important similarity is the main characters’ series of decisions that lead them to their fates. They all follow polished city folk as they go up against rural counterparts. However, Palmer’s sharp writing and tight directing keep you at arm’s length so you’re constantly at the edge of your seat trying to decipher who knows what.Ĭalibre flirts with folk horror like Kill List and, in an odd way, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Continually Calibre wounds tighter and tighter as new information and increasingly distressing events hammer at the pair before a bracing but inevitable finale closes out the taut thriller.Įven more impressively, the most suspenseful scenes are the ones where it’s just characters talking. From that point on, it’s nearly impossible to look away from the screen for most of the running time. In short, the hunting trip goes awry and someone ends up dead. Something remarkable happens about 20 minutes into the film. Though their drunken night on the town is light and fun despite some tension with the locals, the trip is anything but a relaxing reunion between schoolmates. Their hunting trip takes them to a small village on troubled times held up and led by Logan ( Tony Curran in a great performance). Vaughn, who has fiance and baby on the way, and Marcus, a businessman with a cocaine habit, are old boarding schoolmates that have the air of friends that can pick up where they left off even after time apart. Palmer’s screenplay deftly sets up the relationship of the pair in the breezy first act of the film. The film, which is director Matt Palmer’s feature debut, is methodical and precise in its plot as two friends, Vaughn ( Jack Lowden-last seen in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk-is brilliant here) and Marcus ( Martin McCann), go on a hunting trip far into the Scottish Highlands. The movie is literally closing in on the main characters. The shots get tighter and lighting gets darker. The shots are beautiful but foreboding and isolating. ![]() Calibre is a lean and oppressively dark thriller set in the Scottish Highlands that announces Matt Palmer as an exciting new filmmaker and Jack Lowden as a starĬalibre at the beginning is interspersed with sweeping, silent shots of the Scottish Highlands. ![]()
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