What with 13 and this film (released as Calvaire in the cinema), my nice, safe DVD player has become a disturbing and haunted place at the dark end of the room this month.

The Ordeal starts innocuously enough, with its cheesy cabaret singer (Marc Stevens) setting off for a booking on Christmas Eve. He gets lost en route in a remote woodland, and if cinema has taught us anything, it is that you don't break down in remote communities. Stevens encounters a set of natives who make the locals of Deliverance or Wrong Turn seem like well-balanced pillars of the community. A deranged tragicomic tale unfolds with much squealing and grunting.

I think the nastiest things happen in the murky distance and almost offscreen, but this may be because I chickened out and looked away. At any rate, Laurent Lucas, the put-upon central figure of the nerve-wracking Harry, Here's Here To Help, has a considerably trickier situation here. It's one clue that Calvaire is French for Calvary and another that the old man who takes him in is called Paul Bartel, the name of the actor-director of weirdo 80s cannibal comedy Eating Raoul. Cinematographer Benoît Debie also brought us the back-to-front nightmare Irréversible and this collaboration with 35-year-old Belgian co-writer-director Fabrice Du Welz is equally hallucinatory.