Are the locals engineering things? Are Vaughn and Marcus caught up in some larger design, specifically some sacrifice that will help keep these Highland villages alive? In fact, reading Calibre as folk horror potentially turns everything that seems to be accident or coincidental in the film into, possibly, part of some larger plot.
Reading Calibre as folk horror, the viewer starts to wonder if Culcarran’s celebration of Alban Eiler doesn’t involve more than “a bonfire and a piss-up” and if Vaughn and Marcus’s arrival in the village on this weekend isn’t exactly accidental. It just so happens that Vaughn and Marcus arrive in Culcarran on the weekend of the annual Alban Eiler festival-called in the film a solstice celebration that marks the end of the hunting season (though actually, Alban Eiler celebrates the spring equinox not the solstice). That, of course, is the central question of The Wicker Man, and the climax of the film shows exactly how far the inhabitants of Summerisle will go to save their island-exactly as far as sacrificing a virgin at the annual May Day celebration. Marcus, Vaughn, Logan and Alistair have a tense dinner These kind of villages, they, well, they exist on a knife’s edge.” The awareness of all the local men that their villages are “dying” prompts the viewer to wonder what, exactly, they’d do to save their community and their traditions. As Logan says of Drumrain (and the same is true of Culcarran), “It’s turning into a ghost village. Just as in Wicker Man’s Summerisle, moreover, where the life-sustaining crops have catastrophically failed, times are very hard in the Highlands villages of Culcarran and Drumrain, something that two powerful local men, Logan (Tony Curran) and his cousin Alastair (Cal MacAninch), refer to frequently. Iona seems, moreover, to be trying quite hard to seduce Vaughn just as Willow did Howie in The Wicker Man. Two local girls seem very anxious to get to know the visitors-and Iona just happens to be the innkeeper’s daughter, just like Willow (Britt Ekland) in The Wicker Man.
#Calibre netflix plot full
Marcus and Vaughn head into the HighlandsĮarly in Calibre, there is the obligatory pub scene, in which Marcus and Vaughn wander into a room full of hostile-seeming locals, a repeated trope in folk horror. There are long shots of the car traveling through the Highlands that aren’t unlike the opening long shots of the ill-fated flight of Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) to the island of Summerisle, just off the Scottish Highlands. The contrast is heightened by the fact that Marcus works in “finance and investment”-a long way from the traditional occupations of those who live in Highland villages. The contrast between the Edinburgh lads and the locals of Culcarran, where they stay, and Dumrain, where they visit briefly, is stark. Ĭalibre’s intersections with the folk horror plot generally–and 1973’s The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy) more specifically-are numerous. In fact I argue that Calibre is also an instance of a subgenre of horror film that is having an unambiguous resurgence right now, the folk horror film. Indeed, it exists as two kinds of film at the same time, playing on the tension between them. Part of the brilliance of Calibre, though, is that it exists at the same time as another kind of film. Marcus (Martin McCann) and Vaughn (Jack Lowden) hunting
Nothing is wasted in the tight and tense plot, and the ending is both inevitable and unbearably painful. The film’s plot is relatively simple and depends all the more on its stellar cast, and the stunning, alternately lush and bleak, Highlands landscape (not only Leadhills and Beatock but also Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway, as well as Beecraigs Country Park in West Lothian). It may sound exaggerated, but in this case it happens to be true: everything about Calibre is perfect-the acting, writing, directing, cinematography, and pacing.
Despite hangovers, both men head off the next morning to hunt deer, as planned, but they’re involved in a terrible accident and almost immediately lose control of the spiraling, out-of-control consequences. Vaughn, who has a pregnant fiancée, resists temptation and only talks with Iona (Kate Bracken), but Marcus does rather more with the clearly dangerous Kara (Kitty Lovett). They arrive at the Highland village of Culcarran (filmed on location in Leadhills and Beatock in South Lanarkshire) and head straight out for a raucous night at the local pub, replete with enticing local girls. The film features two late-twenty-something men, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) and Marcus (Martin McCann) who head from Edinburgh up into the Highlands to hunt, an activity Vaughn is less than enthusiastic about. Calibre is a brilliant Scottish thriller released in 2018 and directed and written by Matt Palmer, who has previously made two short horror films, The Gas Man (2014) and Island (2007).
0 kommentar(er)
