Powerful

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The movie is slow paced and there is no a single moment where the movie manages to be terrifying. The movie introduces a sexual atmosphere from the beginning and builds upon it a sickening story and atmosphere. Although the movie is not terrifying it manages rather well to be disturbing and sick. The movie revolves around a singer travelling through the woods and suffering a car breakdown in a sparsely population region isolated from the world. Luckily he manages to find some lodgings where he can rest and get his car repaired. The movie portrays the events that unfold rather well. I would give the movie a skip if I was looking for something scary but the movie will fit right in if you are looking for something sickening.

This is part of the recent wave of French extremity where young filmmakers of some ambition are not content with exploitation as were being done in the 70's but have to have some kind of layer in the back that justifies reworking the experience. Martyrs aimed for some kind of revelation for the viewer in the endurance of watching extremity. Haute Tension had its own needless twist for the sake of having one. Gaspar Noe keeps busy tweaking our end of navigating his juvenile imagination.But because these filmmakers are more adept at visceral response than intelligent layering, most of these layers come across as pretentious and solely for the sake of adding 'weight'.Here we have Straw Dogs reworked to be about a man as the perverse object of backwoods desire. The added layer? A Jesus parable thrown in the back where our man ascends his own Calvary Hill of degradation.The horror is basic and attempts some bargain-basement surrealism. The layer is once more pretentious and useless.

After searching on the internet i found this film and i am happy to say that my search payed well.It is based in a small village in Belgium where our young talented singer is about to experience something new and painful to be frank,movies like this in my view are not made routinely ,and even if they are they never quite fulfill your expectations and so i recommend this one to all the thriller fans looking for another good movie to watch and be taken aback or be terrified.Its very hard to find such films especially when nobody around you is a fan of thrillers and horror films.Pretty awesome film with pretty awesome effect on the mind and so all in all very entertaining.

One can be excused for expecting just a little bit too much from this Belgian horror opus. For starters, I had been highly impressed by my three previous encounters with Belgian fantasy on film – all of which happen to be the work of Harry Kumel i.e. THE WARDEN OF THE TOMB (1965), MALPERTUIS (1971) and, especially, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971); it features one of Jean Rollin's muses (ex-porn starlet Brigitte Lahaie) in the cast; besides, its original title of CALVAIRE promised a spatter of apocalyptic visuals.As it turned out, the film failed to deliver on all three counts: Kumel's reputation as Belgium's finest filmmaker is as safe as ever; Ms. Lahaie only has a tiny bit at the very beginning (as one of the singer protagonist's coterie of mature female admirers); and the Christ-like imagery barely registered. Having said that, watching THE ORDEAL was no ordeal {sic} in itself but, judged against other ultra-visceral contemporary Gallic horror fare, a surprisingly muted experience…and that is counting the by-now familiar view of villagers consorting with their farmyard animals.I cannot say that the inherent black comedy elements in the hero's weird predicament (stranded in the woods, he is forced to 'portray' the deranged former magician/innkeeper's straying wife…who also happened to be the local patriarch's lover!) were particularly pronounced either. Suffice it to say that the film's most disturbing moment for me was one of the most seemingly innocuous ones – seeing the 'normal' villagers at the bar go into their thoroughly nutty dance moves moments after having banished the 'sick' innkeeper from their midst!