‘Peak Everything’ movie review: an unusual eco-comedy
Climate-change anxiety begets love in this offbeat French and English language comedy, a quirky combination of romance and disaster movie, as its original title, Amour Apocalypse, suggests.
It was first released at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, in recognition of the unique approach of filmmaker Anne Émond. Unlikely heroes, ridiculous circumstances, and seeing the funny side of total calamity make it an unusual but entertaining film.
The film’s producer, Sylvain Corbeil, commented during a film festival Q&A that Peak Everything “should produce equal amounts of relaxation and anxiety” in the viewer. According to Corbeil, the idea for the script came up during the COVID pandemic and was influenced by the mood of constant worry, but the director applied that mood to an even greater source of anxiety: the environment.
Kind but hapless Adam (Patrick Hivon) has a minimal and unsatisfying life. He runs a dog kennel, where he is taken advantage of by both clients and his hilariously entitled employee. He has no real friends and has a cold and dismissive father as his only living relative. His personal obsession is climate change and the global cataclysm he is sure is coming, which leads to mild depression. Finding little help from conventional therapists, he delves into alternative approaches, including a ‘pyramid therapy lamp’ whose light spectrum is meant to diffuse negative feelings.
In one of the more unpromising of romantic first-meetings on film, when Adam phones the manufacturer’s help line for assistance with a damaged therapy lamp, he strikes up a surprisingly comfortable conversation with the representative, Tina (played by Piper Perabo), and ends up spontaneously expressing his fears and struggles to the stranger on the phone.
Tina not only sympathises but shares his obsessive concern for the planet’s future, and they make an unexpected connection. The plot thickens when a natural disaster takes place near Tina’s distant call centre, rousing all Adam’s worst fears of a man-made apocalypse. Adam feels impelled to overcome his panic, travel there, offer assistance, and finally meet Tina in person.
The resulting comedy of errors follows Adam as he confronts his fear and incompetence, driving cross-country directly into a scene that brings his worst nightmares to life. The action is accompanied by periodic voice-over narration by a solemn voice explaining either scientific details of climate change or facts about climate-based melancholy and fear.
His eventual meeting with Tina is even more chaotic and amusingly error-ridden, involving battles with nature, law, social restrictions, and Adam’s own diffidence and insecurity. The film takes some risks by satirising virtually everything, from trivial concerns and unlikable characters to clinical depression and environmentalism, potentially offending viewers virtually anywhere on the social or political spectrum.
Patrick Hivon is consistently funny and relatable as the inept and put-upon Adam; the producer indicates he was chosen for the role because of the “vulnerability” he could present as the floundering protagonist. The appearance of Piper Perabo as Tina takes the story up a notch, in terms of both comedy and action, as the characters bounce off each other in an endlessly turbulent way.
As Tina experiences both their love affair and being free to express her environmental views as liberating, she leads Adam on a slightly frightening adventure involving not only romance and intermittent rejection, but also an unpredictable foray into public protest and petty crime. The story takes a series of surprising turns before the end, including a great deal of high-energy disaster, ironically legitimising the environmental paranoia it had caricatured, as well as some charming fantasy scenes, before bringing it all to a conclusion that accepts the ridiculous side of even the most serious human concerns.
