The Ordeal

Colour, 35 mm
Belgium, France, Luxembourg, 2004, 94 min
Section: Focus on Belgian Film

About the film

Crooner Marc is making ends meet by performing in retirement homes scattered across the country. On an overnight drive through the foggy Ardennes, his old delivery van breaks down and he has to find shelter at a remote inn. The oddball innkeeper, Bartel, clearly hasn’t had many guests in recent years, certainly not since his wife left him in the lurch. The next day it turns out the van won’t be that easy to fix and the telephone doesn’t seem to be working either. Obviously, Marc won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. The torment suggested in the title can now commence.... The result is a dark, surprising and violent horror film, which refers, in a comic yet gruesome way, to illustrious predecessors such as Deliverance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Misery. The main character’s macabre struggle for survival leaves the viewer completely shocked and disconcerted after witnessing this bizarre and absurd "love story.”

About the director

Fabrice du Welz (b. 1972, Belgium) studied at INSAS film school in Brussels. His macabre short film, with its strangely romantic title Quand on est amoureux c’est merveilleux (1999), showed that this writer-director was entirely at home with the horror and fantasy genre. The short was produced by Vincent Tavier (who worked on the Belgian cult film C’est arrivé près de chez vous) and served as a springboard for Welz’s debut film, the extravagant horror drama The Ordeal; it was crowned three times at the Gerardmer Fantasy IFF and shown in the Semaine de la critique in Cannes. Selected for the Venice film festival in 2008, his second feature, Vinyan, is a hallucinatory horror trip detailing a mother (Emmanuelle Béart) and father’s (Rufus Sewell) search for a son who disappeared in a tsunami.