Peak Everything

One might assume that Cannes, and especially its Directors’ Fortnight section, would be the wrong place for a premiere of a romantic comedy that might be quirky, but is still audience friendly. Sundance, Toronto, probably, but Cannes seems like a long shot. That would be even more of the case if the filmmaker and the production company Metafilms – also responsible for last year’s Un Certain Regard winner, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language – decided to keep the original title Amour Apocalypse rather than switching it to Peak Everything.

'Peak everything' is originally a philosophical and scientific term from the climate change discourse, and it signals the peril we are all about to face, as we are at the peak of consumption of all our natural resources. That is one of the concerns of our protagonist Adam (Patrick Hivon, of Monia Chokri’s Babysitter fame), a fortysomething kind-hearted man who suffers from climate-change-related anxiety and depression. He might be a kennel owner by profession, but he is not a pack leader, as he is often dismissed by his well-meaning, but rough father Èugene (Gilles Renaud) and bossed around and taken advantage of by his only employee, the bored and egocentric teenager Romy (Élizabeth Mageren). That is the reason why Adam orders a therapeutic table lamp in the first place, and it is also the reason why he misunderstands tech- for psychological support.

This is where Tina (Piper Perabo in her big-screen comeback role after the five-year hiatus since Spontaneous) enters the picture, first by the means of her voice before she later arrives in person. The choice of the name is not coincidental at all, as “TINA” is the acronym for “There Is No Alternative”, also used in the climate change circles. The “real” Tina, who we might fear is an AI-prompt at first – there are some Scarlett Johansson Her (2013) vibes – is probably the first person to take a genuine interest in Adam, his concerns and feelings, which might be the reason he falls hard for her. So hard that, when he understands that she is in distress, he jumps into his car and drives hundreds of miles to Ontario to “save” her.

As it goes with rom-coms, she is about to change his life, his personality, the way the others see him and the way he sees himself. But Tina also has a life of her own: her shitty job, her husband Scott (Gord Rand) who is also unhappy and probably an alcoholic, and a couple of kids. When she realises that Adam is also more than a bit self-absorbed, Peak Everything takes a turn towards a more serious relationship drama, which, for a while, seems refreshing in defying the single-issue agenda-driven trend in cinema, before the writer-director Anne Émond drives it back to the feel-good conventions for the finale.

Luckily, with five previous titles, including the festival circuit successes like Nelly (2016) and Jeune Juliette (2019), under her belt, Émond is an experienced filmmaker who combines the focus on human conditions topic-wise, with a deftness and versatility in approach to the craft. With Peak Everything, she tries to put a lot of very different things, sentiments and genres into one movie, and that it sometimes plays against it as a whole, but the experienced filmmaker squeezes game performances from her leads. She also employs Olivier Gossot’s handsome 35mm cinematography to create a soft, dreamy atmosphere that gets broken occasionally with her “excursions” to other genres, such as two “disaster movie” sequences executed with the bravado on the level of Roland Emmerich or Mimi Leder in their heyday.

However, Émond’s mastery can be best observed in her perfect comedic timing and the use of sex as a tool both for comedy and emotional impact. There are three scenes of that kind and all of them are “decent” in appearance, so even the biggest prudes cannot be offended by them. They are placed perfectly, played purely for laughs, for the emotional peak of the film and for feel-good effect, respectively, and each of them is a little marvel that makes Peak Everything not just a solid movie, but also a welcome refreshment on the why-so-serious festival circuit.

Reviewed on: 19 May 2025