Calibre is a lean and oppressively dark thriller set in the Scottish Highlands that announces Matt Palmer as an exciting new filmmaker and Jack Lowden as a star
Calibre at the beginning is interspersed with sweeping, silent shots of the Scottish Highlands. The shots are beautiful but foreboding and isolating. Slowly the film closes in. The shots get tighter and lighting gets darker. The movie is literally closing in on the main characters.
The film, which is director Matt Palmer’s feature debut, is methodical and precise in its plot as two friends, Vaughn (Jack Lowden—last seen in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk—is brilliant here) and Marcus (Martin McCann), go on a hunting trip far into the Scottish Highlands.
Palmer’s screenplay deftly sets up the relationship of the pair in the breezy first act of the film. Vaughn, who has fiance and baby on the way, and Marcus, a businessman with a cocaine habit, are old boarding schoolmates that have the air of friends that can pick up where they left off even after time apart.
Their hunting trip takes them to a small village on troubled times held up and led by Logan (Tony Curran in a great performance). Though their drunken night on the town is light and fun despite some tension with the locals, the trip is anything but a relaxing reunion between schoolmates.
Something remarkable happens about 20 minutes into the film. In short, the hunting trip goes awry and someone ends up dead. From that point on, it’s nearly impossible to look away from the screen for most of the running time. Continually Calibre wounds tighter and tighter as new information and increasingly distressing events hammer at the pair before a bracing but inevitable finale closes out the taut thriller.
Even more impressively, the most suspenseful scenes are the ones where it’s just characters talking. However, Palmer’s sharp writing and tight directing keep you at arm’s length so you’re constantly at the edge of your seat trying to decipher who knows what.
Calibre flirts with folk horror like Kill List and, in an odd way, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They all follow polished city folk as they go up against rural counterparts. However, the more important similarity is the main characters’ series of decisions that lead them to their fates.
Truly though, the story isn’t something we haven’t seen before. However, when a movie is told this effectively with a Hitchcockian flair—credit has to be given to Chris Wyatt’s masterful editing and composer Anne Nikitin simple but oppressive score—it’s hard not to be engrossed in Calibre.
Calibre is now streaming on Netflix!
Karl’s rating:
Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.