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Tom at the Farm

TOM AT THE FARM (Xavier Dolan) Rating: NNNN


Tom At The Farm feels like a horror movie zapped into our universe from some other, more compassionate dimension. Tom (Xavier Dolan) heads into the beige-bleached Quebec countryside to attend the funeral of his lover, Guy, meeting up with his bereaved family. While Guy’s widowed mother (Lise Roy) seems oblivious to her son’s sexuality, her other son, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), is acutely aware, coercing Tom to maintain the fiction that Guy was arrow-straight.

Mingling melodrama, rural horror and absurdist plotting (Tom’s inability to escape evokes Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel as much as John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness), Dolan takes turns satisfying and stymying the conventions of the genre. The film also offers an unforgettable monster in the prowling, deeply repressed, borderline incestuous Francis: a Frankenstein of sloppily stitched-together sexual energies.

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