Peak Everything: It’s The End of the World (and the Fest) As We Know It

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

The latest from Quebec writer-director Anne Émond was the closing-night film at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. And what better way to close such an event than with an apocalyptic comedy-drama with heart.

Peak Everything walks a fine line between hope and despair but trust it to know how to keep its balance.

Its main character, a Quebec dog kennel owner named Adam (Patrick Hivon), struggles with depression and the nagging feeling that the end might actually be nigh. (I know every generation thinks that, but one of them has to be right eventually!)

“I just wish I could understand the world better,” he confesses to Tina (Piper Perabo), a tech support call centre employee at the company that just sold him a therapeutic desk lamp.

She sympathizes with his plight, and the two form an odd, quasi-romantic relationship over the phone — as soon as he confirms that she’s not actually an A.I. (I’m so paranoid about the creeping advance of the machines that I had the same concern when she was just a voice on the phone.)

Then, when a natural disaster threatens the Sudbury call centre where Tina works, Adam steals his dad’s car and drives across two provinces to check in on her.

The film’s title conjures up a kind of end-times aesthetic — we’ve hit peak oil, peak climate change, peak political instability, you name it. Even the characters’ names fit the pattern, with Tina being an acronym for “there is no alternative,” and Adam’s therapist at one point pondering an abbreviation that includes anxious, depressive and atypical.

Émond’s films includes last year’s excellent dark thriller Lucy Grizzli Sophie, about a woman seeking revenge on an online bully. She brings a lighter touch and a more comic tone to this one, though the stakes — the French title is Amour Apocalypse — couldn’t be higher.

And where last year’s movie landed on a rather sombre note, Peak Everything manages to keep itself more positive than negative.

“It was nice to have you guys in my life even if it was for a short time,” one character says near the end of the story. I felt a similar gratitude for this winsome hundred-minute film.

Peak Everything. Directed by Anne Émond. Starring Patrick Hivon and Piper Perabo. In theatres September 26.