La Boca, location along the Chilean coast.

Sister Monica takes care of a small group of priests, in a cottage overlooking the sea.

They eat, pray and bet on racing dogs.... But why are they there?

Father Lazcano has just arrived and outside the house a certain Sandokan is waiting for him, an unhappy, misfit and poor man who screams at him with all his might, in obscene song, all the abuse he suffered as a child. Disturbed by the guilt, the priest commits suicide, leading Jesuit father and psychologist Garcia to the scene to launch an uncompromising investigation into the incident.

Thus emerges the past of these priests addicted to pedophilia, alcoholism, gambling and homosexuality, removed by church hierarchies simply because they were unwelcome but as far from repentance as ever.

From every conversation between Father Garzia and the guests of the house, there are stories of boys induced to fellatio, as "sacred," peppered with penetrations and erotic games passed off as customary activity.

El Club is one of the many residences of atonement in which these bodies of crime, as morbid, perverse and immoral as they are immune to guilt, contrition and remorse, are confined.

All of this will be made against Father Garcia, who would like to close this retreat that until the end of time involves waking up, prayer, breakfast, mass, lunch, singing, free time, rosary and then dinner. A canonical program, with its own rules, which includes a Post Mortem ending....

A peripéteia and metabolè, Aristotle would say, worthy of the best Greek tragedian: the investigation is more ontologically satanic than any miserable profane pedophilia.

Larrain knows how to perfectly narrate man in captivity, especially where political dictatorship is compounded by that of a church for which the end justifies any means.

In order to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, who gets in the way is the inhumanity of a violent and unsustainable human.

This is compounded by an opaque, murky, muddy film aesthetic through which a tangible veil seems to obscure, as if in a delusional reality, a paling hell.

Even the sight must receive its portion of unpleasantness; disturbing words, dissonant music and disturbing narratives are not enough.

The solution is always found especially where the removal mechanism of power, even through its own inquisitorial action, cannot silence its fearful irreducibility to be seen for what it is.

The consecration of de-consecration, the sacredness of desecration, the cultivation of evil, the perverse narcissism, the transfiguration of morality, the nonchalance of abjection, the exaltation of irresponsibility, the perseverance of self-justification.

Larrain's irony, recounts the wretched cruelty, the disgusting ambiguity, the guarantee of impunity of the soldiers of the church who seek other scapegoats on whom to rage, to stun and intoxicate their own inculpability.

In Larrain's Genesis, darkness swallows the light and thus goes straight to heaven....

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice