Back in 2011, The Playlist ran a Halloween-inspired feature on must-see foreign language horror films. This writer fought hard for the inclusion of “Calvaire (The Ordeal)” from burgeoning Belgian genre filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz. The film achieved a very specific kind of notoriety in being lumped in with the New French Extremity, a term coined by Artforum critic James Quandt. He used the name as a pejorative to describe what appeared to be a new wave of highly transgressive works by French directors—Gaspar Noé, Alexandre Aja, and Catherine Breillat, to name only a few—starting in the late 90s and bleeding profusely into the aughts. Despite not being French, Du Welz made the team, so to speak, and “Calvaire” officially put the then 31-year-old stalwart genre aficionado on the map for fans of a certain kind of upsetting and, well, extreme cinematic experience.
Yet time passed, as it does, and after his eventual 2008 follow-up, “Vinyan,” a riff on the 1976 Spanish cult film...
