When Pablo Larraín was growing up Catholic in Santiago, he was struck by how physically close he found himself to the priests. In the confession box, he could tell what the padre had eaten for lunch, or that he wore a new cologne.

Larraín is now 39, a successful director of acclaimed films, a Chilean with an international reputation. On a wet day in London he is briskly affable, sipping coffee, dark-haired and bearded. He doesn’t identify as Catholic any more. “I respect the message of Jesus. But humanity is in the middle. That is when I get afraid.”

His new film is called The Club, set in a modest house in a tiny fishing village. Life passes quietly for the residents, a group of men who share the home and a secret. They are all ex-priests, now in hiding after – well, each has a story they tell. The real reason emerges when a rumpled fisherman appears outside, describing loudly and in boggling detail the sexual grotesqueries one of their number subjected him to as a child.

Director Pablo Larraín

Larraín says he never suffered abuse himself, but that the clergy of his youth include men now vanished and in jail. The Club began with a photograph he saw of a house in rural Germany. It was chocolate-box pretty, set in green fields with a snow-tipped mountain backdrop. Living there, he read, was José Cox, a former Chilean bishop. Back in South America, Cox had been accused of serially abusing boys – or as the archbishop of Santiago put it in 2002, showing them “exuberant affection”. No criminal charges had been brought. The archbishop said Cox would now be somewhere he could “continue praising God and [seeking] forgiveness for his errors”. That appeared to be this scenic dream home, owned by the Schoenstatt Catholic order.

Larraín heard rumours of similar safe houses the church maintained around the world for priests it needed to airlift from scandal. The idea outraged him, but also sparked his curiosity. He owns a beach house on the Chilean coast; nearby is a hamlet called La Boca, with a permanent population of 490. “It’s just a couple of miles away. I buy seafood there.” It became the location of the house in The Club, its taciturn guests tended to by the hawk-eyed Sister Monica. For that key role, Larraín cast his wife, the actor Antonia Zegers.



Pinochet died free – and without justice, wounds can't heal

The Club is being released after this year’s best picture Oscar was won by Spotlight, another indictment of a church concealing terrible wrongs. “You don’t want to make a movie someone has already made,” Larraín says. “This is my film.” Indeed, while Spotlight was a story about the belated promise of justice, The Club concerns something blacker: its evasion.

Last year, Pope Francis was filmed telling tourists in Vatican City that Chileans protesting an alleged cover-up of abuse were “dumb”. The country also spent two decades under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, many of whose torturers remain openly at large. For both church and state, it seems, only God can judge.

“The connection between them is impunity. With the dictatorship as well, justice never came. Without that, wounds cannot heal. Pinochet died free, you know?” He sighs. “Acknowledgment changes things. But when it doesn’t happen, they just get worse.”

The Club’s Alfredo Castro, in Larraín’s 2010 film Post Mortem.

For most of his career, Larraín has been wrestling with the ghost of Pinochet. In 2008’s Tony Manero, a middle-aged sociopath in the Santiago of 1978 becomes obsessed with Saturday Night Fever, Larraín’s comment on the US role in the dictatorship. In 2010’s Post Mortem, a morgue assistant deals with the corpses left by the 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende. Then, in 2012, there was No, a spring-heeled tale of the end of the regime.

Our family talks politics a lot. And we barely agree on anything

The films were made as a trilogy; but The Club feels like the work of a director still gnawed at by life in a country with a bad conscience. Larraín’s family have long dwelled in the upper strata of Chilean politics. As recently as 2011, his mother, Magdalena Matte, was a minister in the rightwing government of Sebastián Piñera. Larraín’s father, Hernán, has, for many years, been a prominent conservative senator with the Independent Democratic Union, the party originally founded by a Pinochet adviser to support military rule. Although Hernán Larraín only joined in 1991, a year after Pinochet left government, he became a leading light in a party still accused of downplaying the dictatorship’s crimes. (In 2013, he publicly apologised for not having condemned the generals.)

Discussing a link between his films and his family, Larraín’s smile fixes slightly. “I understand the question. But I also want you to understand it’s absolutely possible to be raised by people with a certain way of thinking, yet be educated with freedom and end up thinking differently. I respect my parents for allowing me that freedom. It must be hard, accepting that your son is so different from you.”

A scene from The Club

Does he talk politics with them? “A lot. Of course. And we barely agree on anything.” Larraín’s older brother, Hernán Jr, is also active in politics – “he’s kind of a rightwing guy” – while another brother, Juan, produces his films. “And then I have three sisters [Magdalena, Maria and Blanca], who all have different opinions, too. His paternal grandfather, he says, was fiercely opposed to Pinochet, his maternal grandfather close to Salvador Allende. “So if we’re talking about my family, we should talk about all my family.”

Larraín’s films aren’t just politically alive, they’re bracing as cinema. No was shot on U-matic tape to imitate lo-fi 80s Chilean TV news; The Club unfolds in ashen half-light, as if the moral rot had got into the sun. He shrugs at the idea that, as a director, moving into the English language is inevitable. “I just want to be able to control the story, and for it to mean something to me.” But he is making his first American film: Jackie, a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy in the days after John F Kennedy’s assassination. Before that will be another Chilean movie, Neruda, about the 1940s hounding of the communist poet Pablo Neruda. “The scale is big. The money. Here, you might not think it was big, but it’s big for us in Chile.”

The money may get bigger still. Larraín’s dream project, marooned in development, is a remake of Brian De Palma’s Scarface. It would be set in Los Angeles, with a Mexican kingpin replacing the Cuban Tony Montana: quite something in Trumpian times. Larraín is coy. “I could never talk about a movie I haven’t made yet.” It would be a hell of a risk, remaking a film whose every line is someone’s favourite ever. There’s a laugh and an eye roll. “Tell me about it!”

Watch the trailer for The Club

For now though, he has heavier opposition. While The Club has been ardently reviewed, in Italy there was trouble. There, the influential Italian Episcopal Conference, a group of Catholic bishops who issue the faithful guidance on films, described it as “Not Recommended/Unusable/Indecent”, their rarely used and most damaging rating.

There has been no official response from the Vatican. Larraín shakes his head. “They’re smart. They know if they say anything it makes the movie more visible. So they don’t say anything. And they hope it just isn’t talked about.”