Xavier Dolan
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(He could be airing out his dirty laundry, but hey.) Dolan’s juvenile greeting is both appropriate and hardly unexpected, coming from a filmmaker whose latest emotional tornado finds the time for masturbation jokes, Home Alone shout-outs, and cheesy-great ’90s music cues—filmed, for the most part, in a brazen 1:1 aspect ratio that’s sure to infuriate a few critics.
There are moments of intense humor, including one of the most infectiously laugh-along scenes of drunken female bonding that we've ever seen and right down to tiny details like Steve doing the Macauley Culkin "Home Alone" face when looking in the bathroom mirror.
Pilon, a handsome young man who could pass for Macaulay Culkin’s older cousin (Dolan even throws in a fun, passing reference to Home Alone), radiates vulnerability and menace in equal measure.
There’s a feeling that just about anything could happen — that a serious film could include a shout-out to “Home Alone” or milk agony out of a scene where someone karaokes Andrea Bocelli at a dive bar.
That sense of transference seems to solidify this idea of Tom at the Farm as Dolan’s ‘persona’ film, even daring enough to be deliberately reminiscent of Bergman’s existential nightmare Persona—even recalling certain imagery from the film and through dialogue (such as a scene that recalls the erotic tale Bibi Andersson tells to Liv Ullmann).
And his decision to shoot Mommy in a 1:1 aspect ratio—which on the big screen resembles the vertical view from a smartphone—is a gimmicky ploy for intimacy, not unlike Spike Lee offering one reel of Crooklyn in squeezed anamorphic.
But few dramas have confronted a parent’s struggles raising a problem child—not including 1990’s “Problem Child,” for obvious reasons.
The film’s final image brings to mind an iconic scene from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a classic of generational distemper that Dolan’s new film would sit happily next to on any true cinephile’s shelf.
Algunos aseguraban que Dolan había hecho su propia versión de Brokeback Mountain (2005) con Mathias et Maxine .
Dolan lifted the slow-motion interludes of Wong’s In The Mood For Love to good effect in Heartbeats, his similarly florid take on unrequited affection, but they’re seamlessly applied to an emotionally direct drama.
Their verbal battles — in a raw Quebec patois that necessitated showing this French-language film with French subtitles — would singe the ears of the bickering couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
influenced by Mommy (2014)
Visuals
…the most enthralling diegetic aspect-ratio switch since Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (2014)…
Recalling Andrea Arnold’s similarly angst-ridden teen drama Fish Tank (2009), Mommy blazes across the screen thanks to Dolan’s impeccable taste in pop music soundtracks and visual compositions.
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg
influenced by Tom at the Farm (2014)
Visuals
Cut to a string of God’s eye view shots of her car (presumably taken from the cutting room floor of Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm ) and close-ups on her ringing phone, where a man named Ben tells her that one fight shouldn’t end a relationship.
Por ejemplo, la imagen inicial en blanco y negro que muestra el logo de Cinemascope cortado, se ensancha hasta obtener toda su dimensión panorámica y adquiere color: es un guiño tanto a Frank Tashlin –quien ya hizo algo parecido antes que Xavier Dolan en Mommy– como a los experimentos de metalenguaje de los cartoons de Tex Avery.
It’s par for the course, though, in a film that goes from threatening to bust into a musical in a mall parking lot or staging a shopping cart chase like a scene from The Blues Brothers to plunging into A Clockwork Orange-style intimations of state-sanctioned torture—there’s a scene in the back stretch, for example, that’s harder to watch than anything since David was dumped in the woods in A.I. It’s precisely this willingness on Dolan’s part to engage in the full emotional spectrum that makes the film so satisfying, rough edges and all.
Mommy is the Raging Bull of dysfunctional-family dramas, a story of the combative relationship between a mother and her son filled with delirious swells of effusive love and sudden plummets into madness and hate.
Mommy puts all its personal baggage on the table like Ally Sheedy emptying her purse in The Breakfast Club, and Dolan is to be admired for sharing so much of himself, and doing it with such evident passion.
Playing momentarily against the grain of the scene, until they begin to envelop it, are choice selections like ‘Colorblind’ from the Counting Crows, ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ from The Verve (very Cruel Intentions) and even Canadian “national treasure” (as Steve calls her in the film) Celine Dion gets a run.
The blond, beautiful, made-for-a-fairy-tale Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), the grieving younger sister of the slain village girl, throws back a mug of mead for courage and makes eyes at a boy who is not her fiancé before stealing away with him to literally roll in the hay (as said fiancé secretly looks on) to the sound of Karin Dreijer Andersson singing “Keep the Streets Empty for Me,” a track which was also used recently in Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats during another poignant scene illustrating the drama produced by love triangles.
The cinematography by Yves Bélanger (who also did the stunning “Laurence Anyways”) expresses Ellis’ youth, curiosity and discovery of freedom through the colors swirling around her and constant business of her surroundings.
There have been so many “Omen”-esque horror movies about demon children, and many recent films (including “Beautiful Boy” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin”) have dealt with troubled kids and school shootings.