“The demoralizing effect of imprisonment also features prominently in The Ordeal (Calvaire), a blackly comic slice of Grand Guignol presented in the Critics’ Week sidebar. Working the rest- home circuit in the middle of winter, traveling performer Marc (the ever creepy Laurent Lucas), whose van breaks down in the backwoods, is taken in by a jovial but increasingly deranged innkeeper, effectively played by popular French comic actor Jackie Berroyer. Like several other characters, the innkeeper projects his own dissociative desires onto Marc, mistaking him for the wife who deserted him years before. His van torched, Marc is held captive, brutalized, and forced to wear the wife’s clothes - and just when you think things can’t get any worse, the guy from Seul contre tous shows up leading a pack of demented inbred locals. Working with a suitably drab desaturated Super-16 palette, first-time director Fabrice Du Welz draws heavily on the macabre domestic slapstick of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the rural paranoia of Straw Dogs and Deliverance for this unsettling male-anxiety fantasy, striking the right balance between grim sadism and grotesque comedy. It isn’t something you haven’t seen before, but it gets to you all the same.” -Gavin Smith, Film Comment

“A brilliant black comic nightmare. A gripping, utterly involving, horribly funny movie.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian UK

“An eerie thriller. A masterful essay in tension-building.” Kevin Maher, London Times

“An offbeat cross between psychological horror, survival and art-house cinema.” –Axelle Carolyn, Fangoria

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