General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Club

The Club (Spanish: El Club) is a 2015 Chilean drama film directed by Pablo Larraín about four disgraced Catholic priests and a nun living in forced seclusion in a seaside house, whose hidden pasts erupt when a new housemate and a Vatican emissary arrive. It won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, was Chile's official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and received a Golden Globe nomination in the same category.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	El Club (The Club), Chile, 2015, 97 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles³
Director and writers	Directed by Pablo Larraín; screenplay by Guillermo Calderón, Daniel Villalobos, and Pablo Larraín⁴
Principal cast	Alfredo Castro (Father Vidal), Roberto Farías (Sandokan), Antonia Zegers (Sister Mónica), Marcelo Alonso (Father García), Jaime Vadell, Alejandro Goic, Alejandro Sieveking, José Soza, Francisco Reyes⁵
Top honors	Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, Berlin 2015; Grand Coral First Prize, Havana; Silver Hugo Best Director, Chicago¹^•⁶
Awards body recognition	Chile's official entry, Best Foreign Language Film, 88th Academy Awards; Golden Globe nominee, Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language²
Critical scores	Metascore 73 (26 critic reviews); Rotten Tomatoes 88% from 94 reviews⁷^•⁸
Production speed	Script written in three weeks during pre-production; principal photography in two and a half weeks⁹

Spoilers

Premise

Four former priests live in a secluded house in a small Chilean seaside town under the care of a woman, Sister Mónica, sent by the Church. Each has been removed from his community to purge the sins of his past, offenses the film associates with child abuse and other crimes, and they keep to a strict daily schedule stripped of temptation and spontaneity.³ Their routine collapses when a newly disgraced priest arrives, followed by a young man named Sandokan who shouts accusations of abuse at the house from the doorstep; a gun is handed to the new resident, who turns it on himself.¹⁰ A crisis counselor, Father García, then arrives to interrogate the residents about their pasts and their future, and the men turn his questioning back on him and on the Church's claim to moral authority.¹¹

Production

The film was made quickly and cheaply. Larraín described himself at the time as an "unemployed filmmaker" waiting for other projects to be confirmed, so he and his brother Juan de Dios, his longtime producer at the company Fábula, moved El Club forward in the gap: the script was written in three weeks while pre-production was already underway, and shooting took two and a half weeks.⁹^•¹² Actress Antonia Zegers said the cast shot with little rehearsal, learning parts of the script a day before filming.¹³

The technical team included cinematographer Sergio Armstrong, editor Sebastián Sepúlveda, production designer Estefanía Larraín, and composer Carlos Cabezas.⁴ It was Larraín's fifth feature-length film, following Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010), and the Oscar-nominated No (2012).³ The film was shot in La Boca, Chile, and premiered nationally on 28 May 2015 after its February debut in the Berlinale competition.¹⁴

Origin and subject

Larraín traced the idea to a photograph in a newspaper or online showing a handsome house in Germany where a Chilean priest of the Schoenstatt congregation, a man named Cox accused of sexual abuse, was living after escaping justice in Chile. Research into such houses and into the experiences of former priests shaped the film.¹⁵ Larraín described its theme as "how the Church lives in impunity," and Zegers called it a film about impunity and human misery, portraying the Church as a political apparatus that exempts itself from the justice others face.¹⁶^•¹³

The film entered a Chile already shaken by clergy abuse. Public awareness of clerical sexual abuse in Chile rose sharply after 2010, when victims of the priest Fernando Karadima came forward, and confidence in the Chilean Catholic Church fell from 77 percent in 1996 to 31 percent in 2020, one of the steeper declines in Latin America.¹⁷ Scholars of recent Chilean cinema place El Club among the films of 2013 to 2017 that register this break between Chilean society and the institutional Church, portraying abuse and its cover-up while still depicting characters' need for salvation and belonging.¹⁸ Academic commentary has also read the film as an examination of the Church's concealment of abuse and of the misuse of sacraments such as confession and absolution.¹⁹

Reception and awards

At the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015, the international jury headed by Darren Aronofsky awarded El Club the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, the runner-up honor to Jafar Panahi's Golden Bear winner Taxi.²⁰ The film went on to win the Grand Coral First Prize at the Havana Film Festival, the Silver Hugo for Best Director and Silver Plaques for Best Ensemble and Best Screenplay at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Louve d'Or at Montréal, and Best Picture at Fantastic Fest, among other honors, with a total of 28 wins and 37 nominations recorded by IMDb.⁶^•²¹ In Chile it won the Pedro Sienna Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, among others, and it was nominated for the Platino Award for Best Film.⁴^•⁶

Critics responded strongly but not uniformly. The film holds a Metascore of 73, with 18 of 26 reviews positive and 8 mixed, and an 88 percent Tomatometer.⁷^•⁸ Reviewers highlighted its blend of dark comedy and moral outrage: Time Out London praised how Larraín alludes to the wider corruption of the Church while keeping the story local and claustrophobic, and The Playlist called it a gripping thriller and social critique driven by dark humor.⁷ The Irish Times described it as "feel-bad cinema" that manipulates the viewer into sympathy for the priests and revulsion for their victim.⁸ The New Yorker's listing identified the Church's inadequate response to abuse by priests as the film's driving subject.¹¹

Place in Larraín's career

El Club marked a turn in Larraín's output. His earlier films, Tony Manero, Post Mortem, and No, form an unintentional trilogy about the Pinochet dictatorship; El Club shifted his scrutiny to the Catholic Church.²² The Berlin prize also had direct career consequences: jury president Darren Aronofsky met Larraín at the 2015 festival and later invited him to direct Jackie (2016), the first of his English-language biographical films.¹² Larraín shot Neruda immediately after El Club, and the two films appeared in 2016 alongside Jackie.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2015 and 2016 › Released in 2015

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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