Staring into a light-therapy solar lamp, Adam hopes to illuminate more than just his seasonal depression in “Peak Everything.” A kind-hearted yet emotionally stalled kennel-owner, Adam is overwhelmed by eco-anxiety, quietly drowning in feelings of personal inadequacy and unmoored from his day-to-day existence. Pushed around by his much younger, domineering assistant—who trades sex for labor—and stifled by the emotional vacancy of his aging father, with whom he still lives, Adam has little agency. Though an adult, he’s something of a man-child in limbo, caught between lack of care and passivity and inertia.
That is, until he calls what he believes is a therapy lamp company’s emotional support line. Instead, he reaches technical support, and a disembodied voice on the other end gently corrects him. But instead of hanging up, Tina (Piper Perabo) listens. And so begins a series of intimate, existentially charged phone calls that unexpectedly blossom into a quixotic romance—one born of disconnection, yet deeply human.
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This is the offbeat and unexpectedly touching premise of “Peak Everything,” the latest feature from Quebecois filmmaker Anne Émond (“Nelly,” “Nuit #1“), starring Patrick Hivon and Perabo. Its French title, “Amour Apocalypse,” more clearly hints at the film’s emotional DNA: a pandemic-coded, tenderly absurd romantic comedy laced with notions of climate dread and spiritual malaise.
Rather than tackle apocalyptic despair head-on, Émond’s film approaches it unconventionally askew—with deadpan wit, absurdist touches, and a melancholic warmth that keeps the film buoyant even as its characters teeter on the edge of their fraying well-being. The fear here isn’t just ecological or societal; it’s emotional. Fear of a collapsing planet is mirrored in the fear of a collapsing self—of not mattering, not connecting, not changing. Adam’s world is a quiet unraveling, and “Peak Everything” uses humor, empathy, and just a hint of heightened magical realism to stitch it back together.
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Hivon, well-known in Canadian cinema but still a discovery for international audiences, grounds the film with a soulful, understated performance. He captures Adam’s soft sadness and emotional inertia with subtlety and compassion. Perabo, at first a seemingly odd casting choice due to her Hollywood familiarity, eventually blends seamlessly into the film’s gently surreal world. Her performance is calm and anchoring—perfectly pitched for the film’s balance of whimsy and melancholy.
The supporting cast—Connor Jessup, Gilles Renaud, Elizabeth Mageren, Éric K. Boulianne, and Gord Rand—may not be internationally recognizable, but they round out the film’s ensemble with charm and eccentricity.
Premiering in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, “Peak Everything” is a deft tonal balancing act—wry and weird, but emotionally sincere and warm. Émond captures something specific to our cultural moment: a collective yearning for comfort amid existential dread, a need to laugh through the grief of modern life. It’s a romance of paradoxes—lonely but hopeful, anxious but open-hearted—reminding us that even at the end of the world, random connection might just save us all in the end. [B+]
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