Kritiken

A stellar cast of French actors is mainly left to run lines and hyperventilate in Xavier Dolan's turgid yet occasionally affecting melodrama... The film mainly declares emotional intentions rather than sparking emotional effect, and delivers clichés of working-class characters. But there's nonetheless a touch of authentic insight in the connection between Louis's refined inspirations and the house of rough passions from which he emerged.

In spite of the diffusion of dialogue, the film's trajectory is in fact much tauter than the play's, and Dolan wields his medium so as to refuse the possibility that suspense should at any moment slacken. To this end, he keys up sensation in fabulously descriptive and specifically filmic way.

[Dolan's] arsenal of extreme close-ups ultimately only reveals the limits of his dramatic and visual vocabularies, and also perhaps the loftiness of his ambitions. This pumped-up chamber drama feels like Dolan's stab at a Bergman movie, and it's predictably all cries and no whispers, with a few especially egregious sequences and a final shot whose laughably pat symbolism obviously impressed the world's most prestigious film festival jury, if nobody else.

Normally, films adapted from plays are advised to tone things down for the big screen – the machinery of the cinema is capable of providing its own emotional accents – but here Dolan takes the opposite route, ramping up the histrionics to an unbearable degree. The film consequently becomes bogged down in interminable shouting matches, through the fog of which it is difficult to determine what the actual issues are that keep the family members at each other's throats.

Having missed being served up that juicy slice of humble pie due to a prior acting commitment (and also missing out on that surely immaculate 35mm print), I had to wait a day to have my eardrums blown apart by French star-driven hysteria. (Of special note for scorn, if I have to pick two, are Vincent Cassel and a meek Marion Cotillard, who serves as a counterpoint to all the screaming, neither of whom are up for what Dolan demands of them.)

What's surprising about this film is the modesty of its ambition. Dolan isn't trying to tell a ragged epic. This is a capsule displaying the everyday madness of family life. He doesn't show any character in revealing detail. Each person is defined as a collection of surface anxieties that drive each other away. It's a meltdown movie – both in subject and delivery – but the question is: is there anything more?

It's mystifying how Mr. Refn and Mr. Dolan made it into competition, except as would-be representatives of a younger auteurist guard... Mr. Dolan, in his family drama, seems to be trying for the operatic excesses that sometimes work for Pedro Almodóvar, with a touch of John Cassavetes thrown in.

It's like watching assholes scream at each other for two hours. Dolan's shrill film unfolds in ham-handed, cross-cutting close-ups that don't feel like they belong in the same movie. That's the idea, of course: Every character is in his or her own prison, unable to connect. Dolan doubles down on that idea: The shots and lighting don't match, and characters spend entire scenes randomly turned away from each other. But just because it's intentional doesn't make it good.

The only new film in the entire festival to be projected from a film print, it can also, consequently, lay claim to being one of the best-looking films among the festival's 2016 class. This is not to say that this is in any way a pleasant sight to behold; while a full spectrum of nostalgic golds, lipstick reds and eyeshadow blues shine vividly on the screen, Dolan's capacity to manufacture comprehensible compositions makes for an often claustrophobic, virtually impenetrable mise-en-scène.

Watching the movie, viewers may be surprised to experience a rather claustrophobic feeling. Despite a couple of colorful flashbacks, the film is essentially a chamber piece, marked by abrasive explosions of dialogue as its characters confront one another on-screen.

This is one of those dysfunctional-family angstfests that one finds either powerfully cathartic or nigh-well intolerable. I fall into the latter camp, but It's Only The End Of The World has so few defenders among my colleagues that I wonder if it even appeals to the former.

Dolan delivers a strident transposition of the stage piece to the screen. And while he does to an extent stifle some of his more adolescent instincts in comparison to earlier films such as Lawrence Anyways and Mommy, Dolan generally appears to have mistaken maturity for joylessness.