Calvaire

 From the mid-nineties on there was a pretty weak decade of horror films*, and there's always bound to be a reaction to something like that. In Hollywood it took the form of 'torture porn' - A shitty, useless label if there ever was one - and the genre getting generally grittier and meaner for a while.
 The French, though... they took it to a whole other level: Enter the horror wing of the so-called 'New Extremity' films.

 In short order we'd get movies like High Tension, Martyrs, Ils and Livide. They weren't that shocking if you had already watched a bunch of Takashi Miike's stuff; hell, many of them weren't even that bloody. But they all shared a nastiness and an intensity that farted in the general direction of anything the Americans were doing at the time.

 The first thing that surprised me when re-watching Calvaire, one of the earliest horror movies to be lumped in with the new extremity label, is... that it's fucking funny. In fact, you could almost -almost- describe the film as a supremely fucked-up discomfort comedy as much as fucked-up horror. Director Fabrice du Welz weaponizes awkwardness very effectively. He also makes some pretty strange decisions throughout - sometimes they work, some times they don't, but they all add to the film's batshit insane power.

 Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) is a lounge singer introduced at a concert in a retirement home. The chintziness of his gig is played up, but never overtly comedic - even when he spreads a cape with his name on it, or when he sings old standards to a recorded instrumentation that sounds like one of those cheesy pre-programmed accompaniments on  your basic Casiotone, or when he singles out one of the old women in the audience to serenade.
 He regrets this last act when the same woman later gets into his room and tries to make a pass at him. She's devastated when he rebuffs her, an exquisitely awkward scene that both painfully sad and deeply, darkly hilarious. It's followed up soon by a second punchline that... well, I don't tend to like cringe comedy, but it had me laughing for a long time.

 Marc manages to escape the nursing home unmolested and starts on the long drive ahead of him to get to  his next gig a Christmas gala, but his van breaks down in the middle of nowhere. In a stormy night. As they are wont to do.
 With the help of a strange, but semi-helpful local, he makes it to a local inn managed by Bartel (Jackie Berroyer, who kind of looks like an even sadder, dumpier Paul Giamatti). The following morning Marc and Bartel get to chatting - the innkeeper is having trouble getting a mechanic in for Marc's van, so he invites him over to stay at the inn for the next day until it's fixed.

 A few red flags are raised at that exchange - Bartel warns Marc of the local village, but most of the red flags are raised by Bartel himself, who keeps acting overtly familiar towards Marc. As soon as Marc goes out on a walk, Bartel goes full creep, breaks into the performer's van and starts fetishistically going over his personal stuff. Uh-oh.
 Meanwhile, Marc runs into some of the locals... entertaining themselves. I don't normally bother with trigger/content warnings, but be warned there's quite a lot of (not explicit) sexual violence in this movie - and not all of it is against humans. Turns out Bartel's warning was on the money.

 That night there's an exquisitely awkward dinner scene where Bartel forces Marc to sing for him. The next day - forty minutes into the movie - shit finally hits the fan.
 I shouldn't spoil what comes after - you can guess some of it, but most should rightly come as a surprise; After its first sedate half, the film finally starts turning the screws properly and shit gets appropriately insane.

 It's not a hugely gory film, but it is very violent, and prone to bizarre digressions and some pretty... bold choices - a deeply disturbed (and pretty funny) barroom dance works. Showing Marc's frame of mind via a spinning camera spliced with close ups of his wild, bugged-out eyes... not so much.

 The filmmaking is straightforward and deceptively simple - there's a pretty neat shot going into an out of a van that's all the more remarkable for being completely unshowy. Later on there's some very good-looking cinematography (Benoit Debie, a regular Gaspar Noé collaborator) as the film ventures out into the wild. But then you'll get a scene that looks as if nobody had any idea what they were doing, or like something straight out of the Tim and Eric Awesome Show.
 The same goes for the acting, which gets so far out of normalcy that it's hard to gauge what works and what doesn't sometimes. It's pretty fearless work, though, and I have a lot of respect for it even when I'm not sure what the hell it's supposed to be. And Berroyer is often unqualifiedly great.

 The script (by the director and Romain Protat) skirts along the edges of saying something meaningful about refusing to accept reality at all costs, or performative seduction (that scene at the beginning isn't just funny, it's thematic!). It depends on how much credit you're willing to give it, I guess. The fact remains that as effective as the genre swap makes it, it's only powerful because it's unusual - swap it right back, it loses its surprise and goes straight into rote exploitation messaging (don't act sexy or you're asking for it) - so I'm a bit mixed on how I feel about it.

 Hell, I'm overanalysing it. The new extremity wasn't a real movement in that most of the directors lumped into it weren't actually making their movies to form a part of it. But all of them were definitely going for fucked-up, and Calvaire more than most; Graded on how well it hit that target, I'm giving it top marks.

 This, Frontier(s) and High Tension have gotten new transfers pretty recently, and this one at least looks pretty great. The movie itself has aged a lot better than I expected it to, so expect more actual, non-Belgian-French new extremity revisits in the new future. But not Martyrs, because fuck that - once is more than enough.

* Unless you like the Scream movies and their legacy - in which case, for a while there you had much more fun watching horror than I did.