Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz opens his latest film in a nursing home on the day a traveling song-and-dance artist named Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) arrives to put on a show. We know his name is Marc Stevens because it's embroidered on the purple and gold cape he wears, and printed in large letters on the wall behind him. Stevens' act is somewhere between a performance by Freddy Mercury and a staging of Dracula. He hides behind a poofy, upturned collar and steps out into the audience to paw at old ladies, making love to them with his eyes as he sings. After the show in his dressing room, he allows the most lovesick old bag of bones to come in and meet him, briefly. She immediately confesses an all-consuming passion and tries to take him, right there at the make-up table. Naturally, I thought this was The Ordeal the film promised to subject me to, and on that basis I might have given it a five-star review.

However, after that excruciating scene, the film turns a corner into something more conventional and less horrifying than the prospect of octogenarian groupie sex. Marc leaves the gig in his van -- I looked, but couldn't tell if "Marc Stevens" was printed on the side of it -- and then breaks down somewhere in rural French-speaking Belgium. There's nothing but rustic, woodsy scenery as far as the eye can see. Nothing except an odd-looking little man who smushes his face to the driver's side window and asks for help in finding his lost dog, before quickly running away again. What follows is Deliverance with a twist, but the twist isn't executed with any care and the inbred yokels that predictably come crawling out of the woodwork don't come across as very frightening. Compared to the exotica that lurks around the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in the state where I grew up, these guys might as well be E.U. policymakers from Brussels.

The main antagonist in the film is its weakest link -- is a crippling problem for a horror film, of course. Bartel, played by Jackie Berroyer, is first presented to us as a normal townsperson who appears out of nowhere, offering to help Marc fix his van and get on down the road to the next nursing home. Because we've all seen more than three films, we know he can't possibly be who he says, yet Du Welz spends an inordinate amount of time establishing a Fake Personality for this old man. He's allegedly a former stand-up comedian, and tries to relate to Marc on an artistic level, warning him against venturing off into the surrounding village by himself, because the people who live there are "not artists, like us." He's cheerful, accommodating, and after inviting Marc to dine with him, relates stories of his dead wife, who was a singer. At some point during their fireside chats, a bit of wiring comes loose inside Bartel's head and he comes to believe that Marc is his long dead wife, come back from the grave to reunite with him. (Don't worry, that's not the twist I referred to earlier.)

Needless to say, when someone thinks you are the reincarnated spirit of their long-lost spouse, they want you to stick around for a while. Marc is physically prevented from leaving Bartel's house, in a blunt way. In perhaps the best moment of the film, Bartel casually sets a fire inside Marc's van, and there's never a cut-away. The fire is lit, and it grows and grows until it engulfs the vehicle, and we watch the entire process, until the van is completely ablaze. It's one of the few times in The Ordeal that Du Welz rises to the challenge of making us feel isolated -- convincing us that no one is coming to help. This is the kind of backwater place where a van can be cooked in the open without fear of police or firemen sticking their nose in. Unfortunately, the film's suspense quotient goes up in smoke along with the van, and the boring work of torture begins. Marc's head is shaved, he's put in a dress and subjected to all kinds of atrocities that could be part of an interesting horror narrative, but just aren't, for reasons of poorly defined character motivation and awkward pacing.

The prurient torture film seems to have come back into style lately, with films like The Hills Have Eyes and Wolf Creek stirring up a reasonable amount of interest among horror fans. These are films where the most sadistic fate possible is visited on one or more innocents, and the innocents are usually women. Since The Ordeal is less than successful, and the victim is a man, perhaps there's a correlation there? On a subconscious level, maybe it just doesn't tweak our natural sympathy as much to see one man mercilessly beating up on another. We're primed by our knowledge of action films to expect a late reversal -- a last-minute burst of strength or character or something that causes the male victim to suddenly put pain aside to become the aggressor, and start getting payback. (And for what eventually happens to Marc in this film -- I'm thinking of the scene that will create comparisons with Deliverance -- he would need a hell of a lot of payback to even the scales.) The Ordeal isn't particularly frightening, or gory, or suspenseful or well-written. It's just a sad little story about a luckless fellow who may or may not be someone's dead wife, and I was relieved when it was over.