EL CLUB

A nun, four priests and a greyhound, in an isolated house in La Boca, a small town on the Chilean coast. The priests are doing a penitence, the nun looks after them and the dog plays fetch. It is a regimented, dismal, soundless life. A fifth priest arrives, looking like a figure straight out of a Greco painting, along with a sacrificial lamb in the form of a vengeful fisherman. The narrative derails, implodes and upends, and a sixth priest arrives: a destroying angel in the form of a Vatican official. It would be a shame to say more about this dense, sus- penseful, unpredictable film. The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the most recent Berlin Film Festival, El Club combines strong, shadowy images, haunting Arvo Pärt music and a jam-packed script. Its theatre of the cruel is an explosive cocktail of religious chants, priapic diatribe, moral questions and animal instincts, the grotesque and the sacred, shadow and light, to the point where we no longer know which one is blinding us. This is much more than an anti-religious screed, it is a massacre game in which no one is spared as it plies the same dark waters as Les cendres bleues, by poet Jean-Paul Daoust.