Peak Everything (or Amour Apocalypse, its easily translatable French title) is only Anne Émond’s second film to premiere internationally, following Our Loved Ones — easily her best film — which bowed at Locarno in 2015. What’s happened to Émond’s filmmaking in the decade since is a tale of what it means to target success in Quebec’s box office market, which is usually seen as an oasis or a fantasy version of Canadian filmmaking compared to the English-speaking part of the country.
Émond’s subjects for her first handful of films concerned characters on the margins — self-sabotagers, depressives, and people who can monologue, craft, or write, but never take satisfying action. While her tendency to root these characterizations in transparently theatrical stagings could be a liability, in a film like Our Loved Ones a conceptual hook — a time-leaping narrative that never stays in a stable orientation to the present for long — suggested that Émond was a director ahead of most talents of her generation. The mixed response to her follow-up to that film, a fiction-biopic hybrid about the writer Nelly Arcan, meant that her eventual return from a hiatus came in the form of that most reliable Canadian career starter of a film: an underdog coming-of-age story (Jeune Juliette).
Following a pared-down theatrical adaptation last year (Lucy Grizzli Sophie), Peak Everything represents Émond’s pop-refashioned version of a filmmaking perspective, in the form of a zeitgeist-chasing screwball satire, albeit one that catches its breath to flesh out characterizations. Whether this latter impulse is a sign of Émond’s still intact sensibility or not, it’s a tendency that works against the effectiveness of the film’s satire of climate-change-age anxiety.
Adam (Patrick Hivon), a dog kennel owner, is aimless and lonely — easily taken advantage of, or just pushed around, by his father, “friends,” and the one employee he manages. When he orders, then damages, a light-therapy aid (a glowing pyramid in his dark apartment), the hyper-engaged call center voice belonging to Tina (Piper Perabo) suggests a manic escape from the dull predictability of his suburban existence. When multiple phone calls to Tina are interrupted by the radio-play theatrics of disasters striking, he drives to her, eager to play hero, at least in his own mind.
While Émond’s script is staked on its proximity to familiar headlines (earthquakes, storms, and other wild swings in weather), its tone is confused. The humour relies on dog reaction shots and running gags that aim broad, and its characters — each pathetic and thinly drawn to start — grow in sympathy, rather than reveal or implicate the contours of the film’s ultra-relevant situation. That is to say, that the film is pitched like a ripped-from-the-headlines screwball, yet Émond, perhaps subconsciously, pushes the film in the direction of drama. Despite the film marking her debut at the Quinzaine, Émond’s position here is unfortunately not as a bold auteur. Whether by coincidence or strategy, the film feels akin to recent Quebecois titles that similarly pine for a prelapsarian salve to modernity’s complications, in terms of environmental and sexual politics.
In its warm color-timing, snap-zoom camera direction, and spikes in flirty conversational energy, Peak Everything will all but surely be positioned as a film in the wake of Monia Chokri’s Simple comme Sylvain, one of the most successful Quebecois films of last year. And its yearning for offline connection feels of a piece with the role-playing romance of Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds, which won last year’s Best Canadian Film prize at TIFF. While models of success, these are also films that condescend to their subjects and audiences, spicing up the moribund form of the marriage comedy with quirks from first-year philosophy (Sylvain comme Sylvain), escape-from-society fantasy (Shepherds), and end-of-the-world catastrophizing (Peak Everything).
The form of the satire, even when blended to be barely noticeable with comedic or romantic genre elements, is inherently conservative. The newly neurotic is a deviation from the norm, and must be isolated and identified, if not pathologized. It’s not a coincidence that Adam’s father, who rants about his son’s generation and its inability to form traditional families or purchase houses, is the one who literally talks him down from the ledge. Or that the film’s ultimate tonal value isn’t pointed or scathing, but wistful for the comforts of authority, which Adam experiences via meditation podcasts or the responsibilities he assumes to confront the film’s disaster sequences.
Whatever he may represent, Adam is, for the most part, an annoying figure. As for Tina, whose family also appears, albeit in a clumsily executed shading in of her backstory, she exists as a mirror of this condition. Despite the film’s invocation of the limited range of action people feel when facing the destruction and death caused by extreme climate events, the far more worrying aspect of the film is that Émond’s voice as a filmmaker appears to be buried, maybe for good, in hackneyed material.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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