The film’s secret weapon may be gifted editor Chris Wyatt (“God’s Own Country,” “’71”), who keeps the pace brisk but also unpredictable, often choosing to linger on quiet, conversation-driven scenes that reveal their teeth in their own good time. Györi, in his highest-profile assignment since Peter Strickland’s “Katalin Varga,” works wonders with the weather-saturated, bracken-tangled Scottish mountainscape, alternately playing up its menace or magnificence from scene to scene. If nothing here is exactly new, it’s the sheer, breathless precision and momentum of “Calibre’s” assembly that keeps it startling.
He has a wily, wicked foil in Irish star McCann (following his lead turn in “The Survivalist,” not an actor afraid to be in the wars), and it’s their fraught but convincing bond that holds our sympathy even through their most reprehensible actions. An Olivier Award-winning stage actor now settling into a quietly potent, empathetic screen presence, Lowden impressively holds it together through all these key changes, even when his character emphatically does not.
The fallout from this horrific accident proceeds in ways that are both grimly inevitable and gut-knottingly uncertain, as the villagers gradually sense something amiss - and Palmer’s poised Hitchcockian tension tactics give way to a more visceral rush of horror. With a dead boy suddenly on their hands, the shell-shocked men somehow worsen matters in self-defensive panic, with Marcus’s macho rashness and Vaughn’s passivity making for a precipitous pile-up of bad decisions as they cover their tracks.Īll that, and the film’s just getting started. Yet when the lads, a little worse for wear, head into the woods the next morning, catastrophe strikes: After training his rifle on an obliging deer, Vaughn shoots, only for an interloping child hiker to get fatally caught in the firing line. Still, things start off cheerfully enough as they arrive at their rustic woodside lodge, kicking off a night’s carousing and flirting with two village girls - albeit to the consternation of surly male locals, of whom only the older, community-minded Logan (Tony Curran) makes friendly overtures. Young, mild-mannered dad-to-be Vaughn (Lowden) reluctantly leaves his fiancée to spend the weekend with his reckless, randy, coke-snorting best friend Marcus (Martin McCann), who has planned a Highlands hunting expedition as a kind of final farewell to their old days of fancy-free fraternity.Įven if the trip has been arranged for his benefit, it’s clear from the outset that Vaughn views his attendance more as a favor to his untethered pal: Palmer’s script is tacitly perceptive on clashing modes of masculinity, as well as the shifting, drifting nature of male friendships. With minimal setup and on-the-fly character sketching, “Calibre” gets swiftly to business.
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