After the Dictator Trilogy, Pablo Laraine takes the irony at religion. This "Father's Club" is definitely a typical topic of winning. It won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival that year , which is by far the most important award the director has won in the three major European competitions. This is very different from the previous lighthearted and humorous "Chile Says No", and once again returns to the ranks of earlier works that explore the dark side of human nature, but this one is not weak at all.
After a depraved cleric committed a horrific crime of molesting a boy, the Holy See's main concern was not the victim, but how to cover up the crime. These fallen clergy were collectively housed in seaside houses, awaiting their own redemption. The film introduces a criminal suspense type pattern, and the process of investigating the death of a cleric by a young priest gradually reveals the sins of four priests and a nun in this "club". The story is far more complex and heavier than the director's previous work, but there's still the thorny issue of narrative coherence, where Lara always misses the point by making inappropriate choices in trivial editing .
This is not a film about redemption , the four priests are not forgiven by anyone in the end, and the sin is always there. Even the victim is ambiguous about his identity. He is a victim of the molestation case, but at the same time believes in the holiness of the priest, and claims that the priest who sexually assaulted him was his first gay lover. This intriguing entanglement of characters twists and turns the narrative, and continues the absurdity and irony into the final act: a treatment that puts the victim and the perpetrator in the same room slightly better than the genre.
In this work, Laraine continues and improves the aesthetic style established before: dim light, gray filters, backlight photography, and distorted wide-angle photography, accurately depicting the oppressive atmosphere and ugly clergy of the subject. . Through the slow movement of the camera and the shooting in a special position, the most common relationship between good and evil in religious subjects is implied . The parallel editing of the victims being lynched by everyone and the priest being beaten is very high in the Hollywood genre. This plot not only pushes the narrative to the climax of the whole film, but is believed to be the key to the director's promotion to Hollywood.
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