Reseñas de la crítica

Tom at the Farm, adapted by Dolan and Michel Marc Bouchard from Bouchard's own play, has the outward trappings of a genre piece. And as such, it's fairly suspenseful. But at heart, it's still very much an Xavier Dolan film – ragged, explosive, and often moving.

Tom at the Farm strains to be a psychological thriller but its length (102 minutes) dissipates the tension that should be taut and compressed. This is Dolan's first attempt at genre, and while there is much to admire here (mainly the visuals and the score, both stunning), Dolan's interests lie in the strange undercurrents of sado-masochism between the two main characters, and it's a through-line that deserves more attention.

It is loving and emotional but cynical nonetheless, bluntly honest to the point of what most of us would consider tactless, so practical in its expressed need for self-preservation that it becomes callous.

Dolan's idea of how to build suspense involves shadowy close-ups and keeping his scene partner out of the frame. One theme seems to be self-hatred, but Dolan's performance, and his camera's eye, keep insisting that Tom is pure fascination.

Through it all Dolan seems to be exploring different levels of proximity. Tom and the Farm forces its characters to get up close and personal with intoxicating and repulsive memories. Sometimes they are one in the same. What's harder to explain is how this frustration with identity and past trauma somehow devolves into a critique of American life.

A film that so thoroughly externalizes psychological states it becomes almost corporeal, a startling recombination of the film forms scholar Linda Williams famously labeled "body genres." Scraping together the techniques of horror, melodrama, and, if not pornography, then something like romance, Dolan concocts a promiscuously stylized portrait of the sadomasochistic allure of the "masculine." Tom at the Farm isn't a wet dream. It's a wet nightmare.

Tom At The Farm finds Dolan taking anti-gay violence and bullying and doing something rather unusual with it. Rather than making the fully-expected (and frankly tedious) realist tearjerker or talking-heads-and-stats NFB documentary, he concocts a Hitchcock / Chabrol psychological thriller.

While it flaunts its sexuality with brazen matter-of-factness, the cinematic pleasures it delivers are straight out of 1940s and 1950s melodramas. It pays loving attention to the rules of genre, while conveying a sense of danger in male heterosexual insecurity and rage that feels genuinely of the moment.

Critics of this film have highlighted behavioural inconsistencies, but that is to miss the point of this haunting meditation on the power of grief, lust, repression and madness. Each potent state fuels the other against a backdrop of genuine peril that feels all the more intense for the fact that none of the characters are at all stable.

Imagine a version of 12 Years a Slave in which Solomon Northup willingly endures his abuse without making the slightest attempt to flee. This will give you an approximate idea of both movies' tiresome plotting — the circumstances of these young men's would-be confinement are so patently ludicrous that it becomes impossible to take any development thereafter seriously.

What makes Tom at the Farm a particularly interesting work is that under the guise—the very efficient guise—of a psychological thriller lies another more intimate, poignant piece on love and mourning. It is this unusual mix of spine-tingling and heart-wrenching that leaves such an enduring mark.

Dolan is keyed into the salient idea that people are more horrifying when you consider less what they may have done and more what dreadful actions they're capable of doing. Similar to Tom's building pathology, the audience is likely to feel stuck in a Stockholm Syndrome-esque affliction: equal amounts repulsed and fascinated by Tom at the Farm's eerily captivating and resonant environment.