FOUR PRIESTS ARE EXILED TO A SEASIDE TOWN TO ATONE FOR THEIR PAST SINS in THE CLUB

From acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín (Academy Award Nominee, No) comes the highly lauded film THE CLUB, a taut, blackly comic drama that revolves around a group of priests that are exiled to a small village to atone for the sins of their pasts. Directed and co-written by Larraín, THE CLUB functions as an insightful commentary on individual responsibility and organized religion, as well as an artfully relevant examination of what happens when those two combustible elements are combined.

In a secluded house in a small Chilean seaside town live four unrelated men—Vidal (Alfredo Castro), Ramirez (Alejandro Sieveking), Silva (Jamie Vadell), and Ortega (Alejandro Goic)—and the woman who tends to the house and their needs. All former priests, they have been sent to this quiet exile by the Catholic Church to purge their past sins, the separation from their communities being the worst form of punishment meted out by the Church. The men keep to a strict daily schedule devoid of all temptation and spontaneity, each moment a deliberate effort to atone for their wrongdoings. Their fragile stability is disrupted by the arrival of an emissary from the Vatican (Marcelo Alonso) who seeks to understand the effects of their isolation, along with a former victim of the priests’ abuse (Roberto Farias). Both bring with them the outside world from which the men have long been removed, and the secrets they had thought were deeply buried.

Where Spotlight, winner of the 2016 Best Picture Academy Award, follows the commendable efforts of the journalists in Boston who revealed the depth of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, Larraín uses his unique perspective and cinematic style to delve directly into the psyches of the men committing unspeakable crimes under the Church’s umbrella. As said by Bilge Ebiri of New York Magazine of THE CLUB, a Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, “For a brief, agonizing moment, you share the spiritual quicksand with these disgraced men.”