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Aug 14, 2015 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

Devastated by the death of his boyfriend, Tom travels to the rural reaches of Quebec to attend his hometown funeral. There he discovers a grieving mother who was unaware of her son’s sexual orientation, a volatile brother who hates what Tom represents, and a darkness within himself that threatens to swallow him whole.

While it has the log line of a prestige drama, director/co-writer/lead actor/editor Xavier Dolan structures his fourth film (he’s since made two more, as well as turned 26) as a low-key psychological thriller, too sedate to be called Hitchcockian, but awash in the famed auteur’s themes of sexual repression and dark mirroring. Instead of shocks or thrills, Dolan is preoccupied with emotional and social discomfort. His DIY aesthetic of handheld cinematography and loose, infrequent dialogue bears some resemblance to the mumblecore school of awkward dramedies, but the film has no interest in making its audience laugh. Watching Tom mope and cower his way through encounters with his dead lover’s shell-shocked mother and sadistically cruel brother, one is left with a strong desire for each scene to just end, if only for Tom’s sake.

While he has a sharp eye for eerie details—the image of a cow being dragged down a gravel path by a tractor—interesting soundscapes—the mournful French a cappella cover of “Windmills of my Mind” that opens the film—and the combination of the two: various off-putting, mechanical noises over placid, static images, Dolan never really succeeds at making Tom at the Farm much more than a curious mood piece. The characters are all hollow and broken by design, but their interactions only become variations on a theme as the film progresses, rather than digging into any of the themes of family, hatred and grief that the film initially presents. Tom’s disturbed relationship with his lover’s vile bigot of a brother never fully forms into anything beyond a series of tense interactions that eventually trail off rather than come to any meaningful resolution. Shadows seep into nearly every frame of the film, but true darkness never coheres.

www.tomatthefarm.com

Author rating: 5.5/10