Larraín constructs two quite lengthy montage sequences from his sessions questioning the four priests, building not only a picture of their denials and self-delusions but also something more insidious: when the senile Father Ramirez, the oldest ‘inmate’, begins repeating the words he heard from Sandokan about how hard it is for a small boy to fellate a grown man, Garcia wonders aloud if he’s describing a fantasy.ĭirector Chaitanya Tamhane | India 2014 | On road-show release Father Garcia, the Church’s fixer, who may or may not be gay himself but has clearly held to his vow of celibacy, is in turn bemused, horrified and baffled by what he hears in the house.

Garcia’s ultra-pragmatic solution to the problem of the house – of course, it’s the house’s very existence that is the fundamental problem – is to put Sandokan in charge, creating a perfect huis clos that will damn everyone in it to lifelong torment.Īs an account of what the Church will do to protect itself, the film should ideally be double-billed with Alex Gibney’s excellent documentary Mea Maxima Culpa (2012), which explores the heretical belief that an ordained man becomes intrinsically holy. His pursuit of the priest who violated him (this is what provokes Lazcano’s suicide) is a quest for the ‘purity’ that has been missing all his adult life. Sandokan was in fact destroyed by being sodomised as a boy he lives in misery and chaos, sustained by massive daily doses of tranquillisers, painkillers and uppers. (He has occasional sex with women prostitutes, but considers that “dirty”.) Sandokan considers himself touched by God, since whatever a priest emits is by definition holy. Sandokan is central because he’s an embarrassing paradox: a victim whose graphic descriptions of what Lazcano did to him can expose what the house is and why the priests have been secluded there, but also a believer in the Church’s dogma about the sanctity of its priests. The figure who proves central to both disruptions is Sandokan, a mentally unstable man who was sexually abused by Lazcano many years earlier and has followed him from place to place ever since. This cloistered enclave is disrupted twice, first by the arrival of new ‘inmate’ Father Lazcano, who kills himself on his first day there, and then by the arrival of earnest young priest Garcia, who is ostensibly investigating the suicide but has actually been charged with finding a way to close the place down. Rather than defrocking them or allowing them to go to trial, the Church has whisked them out of sight to an anonymous house in a remote seaside town, in effect an open prison which they can leave only for a few hours in the early morning and early evening.

Its members are Catholic priests who have been caught sexually abusing young boys. This ‘club’ is not formally constituted and has few rules.

The priests 2015 trailer