21-05-2025
‘Peak Everything' Review: Piper Perabo Headlines a Cute Canadian Rom-Com Imbued With Very Timely Anxieties
With Peak Everything, director Anne Emond (Young Juliet, Nelly) offers a relatable, if somewhat uneven, dark rom-com that suits these uncertain times.
Patrick Hivon stars as Adam, a Francophone Quebecois kennel-owner wracked with depression and anxiety about climate catastrophe, who cutely meets Ontarian Tina (Piper Perabo) over the phone when he calls a technical support line. Although wildfires scorch, storms rage and earthquakes shake all around the periphery of the film's plot, these two lonely, early-middle-aged souls can't stop their feelings despite clear impediments to true love like — oops! — the fact that Tina is married. Emond's script deftly contrives a third act that's hopeful but still flecked with genuine despair.
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That gloomy undertow may limit Peak Everything's commercial appeal outside Canada, but its debut in the Directors' Fortnight showcase at Cannes may help boost its offshore prospects. That said, this still feels like a profoundly Canadian film, in the best sort of way: appealingly quirky but tinged with melancholy, imbued with a polite, humanist tolerance for even its most unlikeable supporting characters, and grounded in a strong sense of locality and love for the natural world. Tina's origin story is never revealed — a minor shame, because if only it were mentioned that she's American, like the actor who plays her, the whole film could be seen as an allegory of Canadian-American accord just when such messages are needed most, given the current political climate.
At least their romance crosses the Quebec-Ontario border. Adam lives in a small town in the French-speaking province, a terrain that's relatively picturesque although the main road snakes through an area that's clearly seen some serious industrial abuse, leaving the ground devoid of all plant life. Despite his handsome face and fit physique, Adam has seemingly been a bachelor for some time.
He's lovelorn enough that he doesn't protest when his vampish young employee Romy (Elizabeth Mageren) suddenly grabs him and insists on a bout of mutual masturbation while they're out walking the dogs Adam cares for at his kennel. The shot of the pack all sitting patiently and looking in one direction, as if observing Adam and Romy getting it on, must have surely been achieved with the promise of treats and lots of commands to 'stay' (or the equivalent in French), but it's adorable all the same. The next day, Romy exploits the situation by coming in late and later deliberately makes Adam uncomfortable by bringing another guy to work to have sex with.
Adam's boorish father Eugene (veteran Canadian character actor Gilles Renaud, rocking a ridiculous long-haired 'do) is hardly any comfort, especially as he's the sort of parent who immediately flushes the antidepressants and sleeping pills Adam has just got on prescription down the sink, insisting his son doesn't need any of that. By and by, we learn that Adam's mother may also have been prone to depression, and Emond talks in the press notes about a history of suicide and depression in her own family that partly inspired the plot here. But any sentient human who keeps up with the news just a little bit will get why Adam is suffused with anxiety given the overwhelming cascade of climate-related disasters that seem to increase every day, which he describes in detail to his new therapist.
When Adam finds a leaflet that offers a phone number to call for 'support' in the packaging for his new light-therapy lamp, he mistakenly thinks this means emotional not technical support and dials away. This introduces him to Tina, whose dulcet voice and tinkling laugh are immediately soothing, even when she's roughly conforming to the customer-care script she's been given in the call center where she works.
A few not-strictly-necessary calls later, the two are sharing personal details and jokes, which means Adam goes into a panic when the line goes suddenly dead one evening. He grabs the keys to his father's car and drives through the night to find Tina over the border, evacuated to a community center after a sudden earthquake has shaken the town.
This near-calamity really smells of authorial contrivance to get the two principals to meet in person, while further comic hijinks jerry-rigged to drive the couple further together are no less fragrant. Even so, the chemistry between the leads is persuasive enough to let it all slide as we watch the couple bond back in Quebec, sort of on the run and sort of just coasting in place as they try to work out what to do with their growing affection for one another. At one point, Emond and the leads find a creative, erotic way to show that attraction while the characters stay just within the lines of chastity in a bedroom scene where it's all out in the open but nothing is consummated.
Imaginative touches like that go a long way toward ameliorating the film's small but not ignorable flaws, such as its tendency toward sentimentality in the last stretch and the gaping spaces where more character-building needs to be to land the plane safely. Nevertheless, Emond and the cast's comic timing and the palpable sense that the core conceit was borne of a genuine sense of anxiety carries it through. Ditto the grainy warmth of the 35mm cinematography by Olivier Gossot, an old-school touch that literally softens the film's rough edges in the nicest sort of way.
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