A feature film about priests who abuse children is being released on 25 March. Which happens to be Good Friday.
Geddit? The sacrifice of the innocents. A conspiracy of religious hierarchs. Hand-washing by the secular authorities. I’m sure I can think of some more analogies if you give me time, but that’s enough to be going on with. Enough, certainly, for the distributors to boast that the movie is ‘controversially slated to be released on Easter [sic] Good Friday’.
As publicity stunts go, this isn’t subtle. But the film is. The Club, directed by the Chilean Pablo Larraín, sets out to perplex us from the first frame until the last.
It’s one of the finest films I’ve seen for years: a masterpiece of ambiguity that dares to suggest that the abuse of children by priests, though always morally repugnant, is psychologically and socially complex. If it wasn’t, the Church would have found a way to extinguish this fire long ago. As it is, nothing seems to work.
The Club takes us to the ends of the earth: a desolate fishing village in Chile where four disgraced priests live in ‘a house of repentment’, as the subtitles put it, where both ‘self-flagellant activity’ and ‘self-inflicted pleasure’ are banned. They are watched over by Sister Monica (Antonia Zegers, the director’s wife), a youngish nun who is atoning for her own sins.
We see her kneeling, as if in prayer, then realise that she’s helping an old priest vacate his bowels. He can barely speak, presumably the victim of a stroke, but we can’t work out whether he’s senile or indeed guilty of anything: he just pitched up at the house decades earlier.
Arguably there was a time when these retreat houses served some sort of purpose.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in