It's Only the End of the World (2016)

Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World arrives as an adaptation of Jean-Luc Lagarce's 1990 play, a chamber piece in which a dying playwright named Louis returns after twelve years to a family that cannot stop talking long enough to hear him. The rooms are small, the close-ups are relentless, and the dialogue stammers and doubles back on itself. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and was booed in roughly equal measure, which tells us more about festival politics than about the film.

For our purposes, the relevant material is thin and quiet. Louis is gay, and the film mentions his late lover Pierre in passing, a detail carried over from the source with no fanfare. This is genuine but understated, a fact of the character instead of a statement. The cast is a uniformly white assembly of French and Quebecois performers chosen for the awkwardness of Lagarce's prose, not for any inclusive design. Marion Cotillard, Nathalie Baye, and Lea Seydoux do substantial work, yet the film advances no gendered argument. Its women inhabit a family tragedy; they do not critique one.

Strip away the aesthetics and a drama about mortality, resentment, and the impossibility of being understood by the people who raised you is left. There is no class critique, no environmental concern, no historical revision, no sermon. Dolan is many things, but here he is not a lecturer. He is a stylist trapped in a living room, and he wants us to feel the walls.

So we mark the ledger honestly. A whisper of gay identity, a faint echo of feminist presence, and otherwise nothing that would trouble a 2016 awards jury or a 2026 cultural auditor. On the scale that matters to us, this is a near-total abstention. A sommelier might call it austere.

After all that, this is a film about a man who cannot say the one thing he came to say. It withholds, it circles, it exhausts. We respect the craft and record the emptiness of the register with the same steady hand. Some vintages are simply quiet, and we note them without complaint, then move to the next bottle on the shelf with our composure intact and our ledger marked clean. The evening continues, as evenings do, and the cellar keeps its inventory straight, which is all any of us can ask of a long night spent sorting the showy from the merely still, and the merely still from the silent, and the silent from the unspoken, which is where this one lives, in a small and tidy room, saying nothing much to anyone at all, politely, and at length, which we suppose is its own kind of honesty, if a tired one, and one to which we simply nod, put down the pen, and add the film to the shelf reserved for things that meant well enough and troubled no one, least of all history, and called it a day, and a quiet one, and closed the door on it gently, leaving the lights off, as requested, with the house asleep and the argument over and the garden unwatered and the planet unmentioned and the point unmade, which is, in its way, an achievement of restraint, and a small mercy, and a fine place to stop, which is what we shall do, presently, once the inventory is squared, and the evening is closed, and the last light is turned out, and the room is left exactly as we found it, undisturbed, and quiet, and entirely without a message, which is, tonight, a relief worth noting in no ledger at all, and so we close the book, and the film, and the night, and the review, and go home, and sleep, and wake to do it all again tomorrow, cataloguing the noisier ones, the louder ones, the ones with something to say, which this is not, and never was, and that is its entire and quiet story, told and untold, in a small house in a place called Somewhere, by a family who could not listen, to a man who could not speak, and we set it down here, gently, and move along, which is the only way to get through a season like this, and we do.

So the ledger records low. Very low. And we move on to the next bottle, uncorked, unsurprising, and briefly, blessedly, quiet too, we suspect, and hope, and then forget.

That is the review. It is short. It agrees with the numbers. Nothing more need be said, and so nothing more will be, and the cellar keeps its inventory, and the night keeps its silence, and we keep ours.

The end, or nearly, or enough, whichever the house prefers, and it prefers little, and we oblige, and the review rests, finished, and the critic rests too, brief and unbothered, and the whole matter closes.