THE STORY – A kind-hearted, neuro-diverse kennel owner suffering from climate anxiety falls in love with a customer service representative he meets over the phone.
THE CAST – Patrick Hivon, Piper Perabo, Gilles Renaud, Elizabeth Mageren, Eric K. Boulianne, Connor Jessup, Gord Rand & Patrick Garrow
THE TEAM – Anne Émond (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 100 Minutes
Premiering in the Quinzaine section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, this Canadian romcom / eco-drama is the latest film from writer-director Anne Émond, who made “Young Juliette” (2019). Originally titled “Amour Apocalyse”, the film stands out due to its offbeat central character, though it’s fair to say that not all of it works, even if it does sustain a moderate degree of charm throughout.
Patrick Hivon plays Adam Tremblay, a 45-year-old, neurodivergent kennel owner, who lives in a small town on the outskirts of Ontario. His assistant is listless 20-something Romy (Elizabeth Magaren), who doesn’t do well with taking orders and isn’t above hooking up with her boss out of sheer boredom while taking the dogs for a walk (“Don’t get any ideas”, she tells him, “you’re much too old for me”).
Suffering from both depression and climate anxiety, Adam’s life takes a sudden turn into romance when he falls for Tina (“Coyote Ugly’s” Piper Perabo), a customer service rep he meets over the phone when his therapeutic pyramid lamp doesn’t work properly. During their frequent phone conversations, Adam and Tina discover that they share a similar view of the world, and when an unexpected earthquake strikes the town, Adam is compelled to try and find her.
As is the case with all romantic comedies, there are unforeseen setbacks, but to say anything else would be to stray too far into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that the previously unrevealed details of Tina’s life bring new challenges, and their palpable chemistry might not be enough to overcome circumstance.
Hivon’s performance is consistently interesting. He’s by no means a typical romantic comedy lead, and his gentle oddness feels genuinely original and refreshing. Adam is, at the very least, on the autistic spectrum, but the film doesn’t go into any further detail, other than a comedic line from Romy (“God, I’m being rejected by a 40-year-old neurodivergent!”) after an attempted seduction goes astray.
Similarly, Perabo makes a welcome return to the big screen (her last film was “Spontaneous” in 2019), and she proves an engaging and likable co-lead, generating strong chemistry with Hivon. There’s also strong support from Gilles Renaud as Frank, Adam’s grumpy father, while Magaren steals every scene she’s in as Romy, and repeatedly gets the film’s biggest laughs, especially when she’s stretching employee liberties to breaking point.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the film’s strongest element turns out to be Émond’s approach to sex scenes. There are three in total, and each one feels different and interesting, unlike the way those scenes usually play out in romantic dramas.
Feel free to skip the next three paragraphs if you are feeling prudish, but the scenes are worthy of discussion. The first is played for comedy, a second base sexual encounter between Romy and Adam, punctuated with a pitch-perfect collective reaction shot when it turns out all the dogs are watching them. The second is perhaps the film’s most striking scene overall. Having established, for plot-related reasons, that Adam and Tina are unable to have sex, Émond devises a remarkably sexy and erotic scene in which an encounter occurs without anybody actually touching each other or saying anything. The function of the scene is ambiguous, which only makes it more intriguing – ultimately, Émond leaves it up to the audience to decide what it means. The third scene is essentially a climactic comedy cutaway, echoing the first scene in that it is also punctuated with a pitch-perfect reaction shot, although it’s not dogs this time round. Let’s put it this way, it ensures the film goes out with a bang.
With that in mind, however, it’s fair to say that the romantic elements of the movie are much more successful than the eco-drama elements. Despite the fact that the film’s original title had the word “apocalypse” in it, it is never clear exactly how seriously we are meant to take the earthquake. Is it really the end of the world? The film’s ending can be read in a number of different ways, but either way, the audience never gets that sense of doom or threat. That is at least partly down to Émond failing to nail the correct tone, and it detracts from the otherwise compelling events of the second half of the film.
On a similar note, though the film assigns an extremely pessimistic shared worldview to both Adam and Tina (the new title refers to a book by professional thinker Richard Heinberg, about we are all doomed because the world is running out of everything), we don’t really see much of that conveyed or justified by the film itself. Again, that could just be a problem of tone, or it could be down to budgetary issues with regards to the production design, but either way, it never really comes across.
In short, this is something of a mixed bag, but it’s definitely worth seeing on balance, thanks to strong chemistry between the two leads and Émond’s original approach to sex scenes.
