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.Įlsewhere, Palmer and co flirt with the conventions of horror movies, although ultimately the horror is purely psychological, not supernatural in origin.

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. 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 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. Photograph: Anne Binckebanck / NetflixĪmongthe more thoughtful flourishes here is the way Palmer plays with the notion of debt and investment. Jack Lowden and Martin McCann in Calibre. 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. 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).

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. 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.

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.

Calibre film critique