Tom at the Farm

Overview

There are very few names in world cinema today as exciting as Xavier Dolan. Bold, prolific and monumentally talented, the Montreal-born prodigy already has five critically acclaimed features under his belt, including I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats and the recent Cannes Jury Prize Winner, Mommy. It's a resume that would make any veteran filmmaker proud. For Dolan, aged just 25, it borders on the revolting.

Tom at the Farm is technically Dolan's fourth film, made in between the epic length transgender love story Laurence Anyways and the yet-to-be-released Mommy (we caught the latter at the Sydney Film Festival and can confirm it's a bona fide masterpiece).

An adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard's play Tom a la Ferme, at first glance the film seems to be a significant departure for the French-Canadian director; a gripping, single-location thriller more heavily indebted to the works of Alfred Hitchcock than his own earlier romantic dramas. Look a little closer though, and you'll have no trouble locating Dolan's signature thematic hang-ups. Twisted love. Sexual prejudice. An uncomfortable obsession with his mother.

Dolan himself plays the Tom of the title, a young copywriter who travels out to rural Quebec for the funeral of his boyfriend Guillaume. When he arrives, however, Tom discovers that no-one in Guillaume's family knew that he was gay, save for his hyper-masculine brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who will do anything to keep his grief-stricken mother (Lise Roy) from finding out.

Trapped on the family's dairy farm, Tom is forced to help maintain the fiction of Guillaume's life while resisting Francis's twisted mental games. But as the days slowly pass and Tom learns more about the family, the dynamics on the farm begin to change.

The isolated locale proves the perfect backdrop for the film, one that plays simultaneously like a psychological horror story and an examination of abusive relationships, homophobia and gay self-loathing. The film's sparse colour palette — mud browns, fog greys and dead cornfield yellows — evokes a stomach-lurching sense of menace and unease. Likewise, the Bernard Herrmann-inspired score from Oscar-winner Gabriel Yared, full of gorgeously eerie string compositions that foreshadow danger at every turn.

The introduction of a fourth character late in the second act diffuses some of the film's claustrophobic tension. Like everything in Dolan's filmography, Tom at the Farm works less as a narrative and more as an exercise in crafty emotional manipulation. In this case, that emotion is disorientating dread.