As he has shown in Slow Horses, Jack Lowden is a terrific actor and his presence in the cast prompted me to take a look at one of his early starring roles in the film Calibre. This is a fairly low-budget thriller written and directed by Matt Palmer, whose work is otherwise unknown to me; but on this evidence, Palmer too has a good deal of talent.
The premise is straightforward and cut from familiar cloth. Lowden plays Vaughn, whose partner is pregnant, and who goes off on a hunting trip in the Scottish Highlands with his old school friend Marcus (Martin McCann), who is a rather cocky and self-assured, as well as wealthy, businessman. They head off to a small and remote village called Culcarran and meet an assortment of locals who seem faintly sinister. It's entirely predictable that Something Terrible will happen.
So it does, but the strength of the film is that it doesn't follow an entirely formulaic pattern. This isn't - despite one or two red herrings - a rip-off of The Wicker Man. Palmer is interested in the moral choices made by his two protagonists. Unfortunately, most of those choices turn out to be extremely unwise. Nor does the film wallow in gore; I'm glad Palmer resisted this temptation, because the under-stated nature of some crucial scenes is effective.
I was confident from the outset that there would at some point be a chase through a dark wood and I wasn't disappointed. Overall, though, the relatively low-key approach of the film works well, and I'm not surprised that it has been well reviewed. I agree with those who said that it was a good decision not to make the incomers to Culcarran crude and boisterous and English. Lowden's presence in the film ensures that the two young men's essential vulnerability comes over well. This is essentially a story about the duality of Scottish life, the tensions between the moneyed urban world and the rural communities struggling for survival. But it's not preachy - and that is always a plus.
No comments:
Post a Comment