The Club is a bold and bracing allegory of a church tainted by scandals.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
It's all well acted, especially the interrogations, and its specifics haunt and disturb. But as it aspires to parable it slumps into dark melodrama, with competing scenes of mob violence and individual characters freighted with so much allegoric significance that they stop feeling like people.
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
Pablo Larraín's thematic interests shift toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.
Screen International by Dan Fainaru
One thing missing in Pablo Larrain’s new movie is a touch of Luis Bunuel. Without it, the fierce sarcastic attack he launches against the Catholic Church looks a little too much like a self-motivated settling of accounts, terribly angry and lacking a perspective that would put it all into the right context.
A bold, blunt, yet clinically intelligent film that provokes as much for its dark humor as for its righteous outrage, it's all at once a gripping thriller, an incendiary social critique and a mordant moral fable.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
It’s a surprising and often thought-provoking effort from a filmmaker who has never chosen to take the simple path, confirming Larrain as one of the more genuine talents working in cinema today.
The Club offers plenty of stifling, agonized atmosphere, but it’s all penitence and no redemption.
The Club is an enthralling parable that's calibrated to shock and amuse in equal measure.
Those willing to enter The Club will discover an original and brilliantly acted chamber drama in which Larrain’s fiercely political voice comes through as loud and clear as ever.