When Chilean director Pablo Larraín showed up at this year’s Berlin Film Festival with “The Club,” no one knew quite what to expect. Indeed, details of the film’s very existence had been kept quite fairly quiet — but the picture turned out to be a resounding success. It took home of the Silver Bear in Berlin, earned more prizes on the festival circuit, was selected as Chile’s Oscar contender, and recently landed a Golden Globe nomination. Now the picture is headed to cinemas, and the first trailer has arrived.
Starring Alfredo Castro, Roberto Farías, Antonia Zegers, Jaime Vadell, Alejandro Goic, Alejandro Sieveking, Marcelo Alonso, José Soza, and Francisco Reyes, the film is set in a remote seaside town where priests have been exiled to atone for their sins. But soon, they must face an incursion from the outside world. Here’s the official synopsis:
In a secluded house in a small seaside town live four unrelated men and the woman who tends to the house and their needs. All former priests, they have been sent to this quiet exile to purge the sins of their pasts, the separation from their communities the worst form of punishment by the Church. They keep to a strict daily schedule devoid of all temptation and spontaneity, each moment a deliberate effort to atone for their wrongdoings.
Their fragile stability is disrupted by the arrival of an emissary from the Vatican who seeks to understand the effects of their isolation, and a newly disgraced housemate. Both bring with them the outside world from which the men have long been removed, and the secrets they had thought deeply buried. The Club is acclaimed director Pablo Larraín’s taut, blackly comic commentary on individual responsibility, organized religion and the combustible combination of the two.
“The Club” opens on February 5, 2016. Watch below. [Thompson On Hollywood]
