One of the biggest dangers of streaming is having your film getting buried alive under the weight of an indifferent algorithm. Many a film has struggled to emerge from under the radar, only to find themselves entombed deep, unable to shake themselves free from being all but forgotten barely a week after landing, and it’s not a fate that’s deserved by all. One such example is Calibre, the unfeasibly tense debut of Matt Palmer that arrived in 2018, but now goes all but unappreciated to this day because no one seems to have heard of it.
Part Scottish rural horror, part muddy morality thriller, there’s a slight hint of the abject cruelty of James Watkins’ legendarily mean Eden Lake here – but while we sat on the edge of our seats, watching Kelly Reilly trying to outwit a gang of psychotic youths, Calibre gives us something a little different to mull upon. What if those being stalked by outraged locals actually deserved the brutal end that’s being planned for them?
Marcus and his childhood friend, Vaughan are planning to spend the weekend hunting in the Scottish Highlands to celebrate Vaughan’s upcoming nuptials. Leaving Vaughan’s newly pregnant wife back in Edinburgh, the pair embark on their journey even though the man of the hour isn’t necessarily stoked that he’ll be spending his weekend shooting things. However, businessman Marcus can’t wait, and much to Vaughan’s dismay, he discovers that his friend has packed more than just hunting rifles as it seems that his previous cocaine habit has re-emerged.
The two spend the evening at a village pub where they meet various locals. Community leader Logan seems to be interested in them as local business prospects haven’t been going so great and local lassie about town, Kara, takes a shine to Marcus much to the chagrin of some suspicious locals. However, the next morning, the two hungover friends finally get to hunt, and that’s when disaster decides to strike. While drawing a bead on a deer, Vaughan’s slight hesitation causes his bullet to miss his target and wind up in the forehead of a small boy and while he’s rightfully mortified at the accident, that doesn’t stop the boy’s father picking up a rifle with revenge in his eyes. But a terrible mistake suddenly turns into full blown murder when Marcus, in an attempt to protect his friend, shoots the grief stricken father dead.
If they weren’t in the shit before, they’re most certainly in it now and Marcus instantly switches to survival mode, plotting a way for them to hide the bodies before coming back that night to fully bury them in an attempt to get away with their horrible crime. But with Vaughan convinced that they’re only sinking themselves deeper in the mire, getting through the next couple of days before they leave is going to be agony – especially when they discover that the young boy was Logan’s nephew and the locals seem to be getting suspicious…
To deliver the basic bullet points of Calibre (bad joke, sorry), what Palmer has managed to deliver is a no-bullshit thriller that builds unbearable tension from a nightmare situation. Sheer bad luck and awful decision making combine to make a horrific mistake suddenly snowball into something far more serious and whether you like it or not, you’re along for the ride every step of the way. However, while other versions of this film take the Deliverance route and portray the country folk as insular maniacs in waiting, this film flips the script by taking our own judgements about those different than us an skew it in such a way that we suddenly aren’t actually sure who we’re supposed to be cheering for. The answer is scarily apparent in the cold light of day, but for the longest time, the director’s grip in tension makes us surprisingly bet on the wrong horse.
From the awful moment when Vaughan’s bullet mistakenly thuds into the skull of a young boy, Calibre manages to keep you impressively off-balance. For example, after reading the synopsis, I knew what form the tragic accident would take, but the way the death is handled, my jaw still dropped in horror like an animated character in shock. It’s a peach of a shot and the chances of it must be a billion to one, but it’s not the accidental slaying of a child that damns the two men responsible, rather it’s everything the do next. Rather than come clean and face the destruction it will do to their lives, Marcus instantly switches up manslaughter to murder when he protects Vaughan by shooting the vengeful father in the back in a desperate effort to wrestle the situation under some sort of twisted control. Up until this point, we’ve experienced some sort social divide between the visitors from the city and the country community than thanks to the pressure cooker tension between the two that bubbles under the surface, we find ourselves so horrified about what our imaginations have allowed us to belief the villagers will do, we do the unthinkable.
At numerous times we catch ourselves holding our breath when it looks like Logan or any of his cronies are on the verge of discovering a major clue, because the tension of the situation gets so claustrophobic, we automatically have to remind ourselves that our two leads are guilty of the killing and disposal of a father and his son. What’s more, Palmer gives us no real reason to believe that the villagers (headed up by Tony Curran’s Logan) are anything but a proud people who are merely down on their luck and mistrust outsiders. They’re not the townsfolk from the fucking Wicker Man, is what I’m saying and while a terrible reckoning is coming, if the pair had just come clean and honorably torpedoed their own lives at the start, things wouldn’t have gotten so wonderously nail biting by the end.
Palmer keeps a tight reign of the entire enterprise – never allowing things to get too fast or tumble into Wrong Turn style splatter, but he’s ably abetted by a cast who utterly understand the assignment. Martin McCann plays the flashier Marcus real without resorting to cartoonish douchebaggery in order to get his character’s flaws across. Conversely, Jack Lowden’s Vaughan may come across more as the “victim” of the two, but despite of his suggestions that they stop this freak show and come clean, his woeful amounts inaction comes from the fear that his new life as a husband and a father are about to collapse. In comparison, Curran and the other actors playing the villagers also do well by not veering into overblown villainy, which is a fact made all the more powerful when you have to keep reminding yourself that – unlike many other similar films – they actually aren’t the villains.
Super taunt and insidiously subversive, it’s ironic that our leads commit a crime by burying the evidence when that’s exactly what Netflix has done with this movie. Never before has the words “dig it up and give it a shot” been more chillingly relevant.
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