The winner this year of the Michael Powell Award for best British Feature at the at the Edinburgh film festival (a surprisingly rare achievement for a Scottish film), this Highlands-set thriller reworks the hoary old standby: the hapless-urban-travellers-vs-angry-locals conceit. On a beat-by-beat basis, writer-director Matt Palmer’s feature debut skates close to the edge of cliche – only to swerve suddenly in an interesting new direction almost every time. It makes for a work that feels simultaneously familiar and fresh, just like a good, solid bout of genre-tweaking should do.
Anchored by a brace of range-flaunting performances from its two leads Jack Lowden and Martin McCann, Calibre evolves unexpectedly into a moral puzzle about the limits of friendship and forgiveness. Just when you might expect Palmer to break out the fake blood, the film goes unexpectedly, and quite literally quiet, after a somewhat plodding first third. That’s a point worth stressing should you consider watching this on Netflix, given on that platform it’s so much easier to skip on to something else if the opening 10 minutes of a film fails to grab you.
In the foundational first section, we meet Vaughn (Lowden), a nice regular guy living in a smart street near the park in Glasgow, who is about to become a father with his partner (Olivia Morgan). Up for a bit of mock-macho manoeuvres before the onslaught of parenthood, Vaughn agrees to go on a deerstalking trip in the Highlands with his friend Marcus (Michael Fassbender-lookey-likey Martin McCann), a chum from the boys’ boarding school days who now makes serious bank in the financial sector.
After a night on the lash with a couple of local lassies (slightly underused Kate Bracken and Kitty Lovett), the two set out for the woods armed with rifles, ammo and hangovers. That’s where it all goes horribly wrong, and this is definitely an instance where saying much more than that would spoil the ensuing surprises that give the film its impact. Suffice it to say, that most of the rest of the movie involves Palmer twisting the knife in the wound as the characters try to disguise their guilty cold sweat and nausea that isn’t just a result of alcohol poisoning.
Amongthe more thoughtful flourishes here is the way Palmer plays with the notion of debt and investment. The locals, led by hale fellow Logan (the redoubtable character actor Tony Curran), are troubled by the community’s economic misfortunes and keen to draw Marcus and his imagined oodles of capital into shoring up the area financially. And so they lavish the young visitors from down south with hospitality they can’t refuse, no matter how eager they are to get the hell out of Dodge. The constant invitations to stay for the bonfire and ceilidh will evoke anticipation in some that this might go the way of The Wicker Man. Another welcome departure from expected form is to have the way the film emphasises the cultural, intra-national divide between urban and rural Scots – a duller, less imaginative movie might have made the unfortunate but self-centred visitors Englishman or blokes from abroad.
Elsewhere, Palmer and co flirt with the conventions of horror movies, although ultimately the horror is purely psychological, not supernatural in origin. The last shot of a character’s stunned, ravaged expression – an emptied out look of despair – is truly chilling in a way that no hand suddenly shooting up from the ground or it-was-all-a-bad-dream reveal could be.
