A dark, relatively stripped-down thriller, Calibre brushes up against Deliverance-style tropes about city slickers running into trouble with tight-knit rural communities, but at its heart, it’s really just a merciless study in how quickly and thoroughly things can go wrong.
Marcus and Vaughn–old school friends with a little bit of distance and a lot of history–go on a hunting trip in the Scottish Highlands. Marcus is the initiator; Vaughn more of a passenger. He has a pregnant fiancée back home, and his domesticity emphasizes a softness about him that’s lacking in Marcus, who is blunter and more aggressive. He’s the experienced hunter, while Vaughn is the naif who has let Marcus orchestrate the pesky details like his gun license.
On their first morning in the woods, little things go wrong. Marcus has snorted a little coke in order to reconcile himself to getting up at the crack of dawn, and Vaughn is irritated by it; he’d thought Marcus had quit all that. Vaughn forgets his ammo and assumes he can just use Marcus’s instead, and Marcus has to explain through gritted teeth that they have different kinds of rifles, so no, actually, he can’t. He loans Vaughn one of his other guns, breaking the law in the process. The movie plays all this out without too much emphasis, and you can feel how these are all nothing more than minor wrinkles to the characters involved. The cocaine use is the most unconventional wildcard, but Marcus isn’t high out of his mind, just a little more wired than usual. When they go into the woods, they basically have it together. None of these things should matter too much.
Then Vaughn spots a deer, and Marcus coaxes and encourages him to take the shot. And Vaughn fires–and kills a boy who was out camping.
It’s an honest mistake. He didn’t see the boy, and we didn’t see the boy. (And really, when you think about it, shouldn’t a kid growing up in an area known for its hunting be a little more cautious about hanging out right next to that season’s game? Come on, kid.) Vaughn completely freezes up–and then the boy’s horrified, grief-stricken father crashes into the picture, and it’s hard to tell if he’s hearing any of Vaughn’s stammered explanation. He’s also equipped for hunting, and he’s drawing a bead on Vaughn. Will he fire? We never know, because Marcus fires on him first.
The move may have saved Vaughn’s life, but it’s left them with two dead bodies–one of them only a child–and the dawning certainty that reporting this would ruin their lives. Vaughn argues in favor of the law, but Marcus lays out how neatly trapped they are: drugs, alcohol, and a child shot with a gun Vaughn wasn’t legally allowed to carry. And while the village is dying, its economy withering on the vine–the top man there, Logan, even humbles himself to suck up to investment banker Marcus in the hope of getting some grants and projects funneled into the area–its sense of camaraderie is alive and well. These people have nothing except each other, and Vaughn and Marcus have just killed two of their own. Marcus insists that they have to cover everything up.
The film goes on neatly from there, not really introducing anything new but just playing off everything it’s already set up, letting consequences unfold and multiply of their own accord. Calibre knows that it doesn’t have to put too many story elements in the mix, so it makes its plot work with details about cocaine and ammunition, with ordinary relationship tensions and social conflicts. There’s a very slight touch of horror to the exact way everything turns out, but the movie earns it by being so straightforward and grounded everywhere else. It doesn’t qualify as a great film, but it’s a very satisfying and well-constructed one, invested in fundamental storytelling virtues a lot of contemporary genre movies don’t bother with.