It heralds the arrival of a director to watch out for and promises bigger roles for its two main leads. Presently, its narrative weight unbalances the overall emotional arc of the film.īut the deliberate nature of the narrative, barring these missteps, largely serves to elevate Calibre’s impact.
The film could have gained by offering a few more clues about the emotional finale that awaited us. So when the ending arrives, while never entirely unpredictable, it seeks to shatter the sense of warmth we’d grown accustomed to. The switching emotional gears and the occasional overturning of genre expectations never threatens to derail the patina of warmth it continues to offer us. Throughout its runtime, Calibre appears to assure us about its purpose. The bromance goes horribly wrong and the final image of Vaughn, his face lashed by terror and guilt, goes deeper into the conscience than any gory sequence ever can. Vaughn suffers under the yoke of the past and the future and when they become too much for him, events take an even more tragic turn. Do they know? What if they don’t? Should we confess? Should we not? Oh and then there’s the baby. The uncertainty of the implications of their actions threatens to upend their chances of making it out safely from Dodge. The locals’ confusion in particular drives Vaughn into fear and despair. He leaves it hanging like a little, red thread over the picture, preferring to focus on his characters’ moral ambivalence following the tragedy. Palmer never dwells on this theme for too long. Coupled with Marcus’ arrogance, it serves to heighten the confusion they face while hosting the duo. The locals are aware of the possibilities and implications of his presence. Marcus comes with the promise of bringing business into the small town. Palmer also lodges economic and moral conflicts into the narrative with great ease.
Calibre’s great achievement thus becomes its honest denouement, perfectly justified, however brutal it may appear at first sight. But Palmer’s unwavering attention to the dynamics between his two characters and their cat and mouse with the locals creates an atmosphere that sucks you in for good. It will be a stretch to claim that the seasoned film watcher won’t be able to see the ending coming in advance. Slowly and steadily, with the patience of a sculptor, Palmer works away at their personalities till their true selves are revealed to the audience. Jack Lowden and Martin McCann’s portrayal of Vaughn and Marcus, characters whose need to balance the audience’s empathy and disgust is no easy task, elevates Calibre. Hereon, Palmer veers away from genre expectations, switching emotional gears expertly and plunging the protagonists and his audience down a rabbit hole of guilt, misery and utter fear. It is cut short by a tragedy that triggers the film into a new, harrowing direction. Predictably, the deer hunt doesn’t go according to plan. A drunken night of revelry ends in a romp with a couple of local girls, which only serves to upset the townsfolk further. Image via soon as Marcus and Vaughn drive into their inn at Dodge, a sleepy little town nestled in the highlands, it becomes clear that they aren’t quite welcome there.
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