At an intermediate point between thriller and melodrama, Tom on the Farm (2013) contained some of Xavier Dolan’s most successful cinematic moments. The hypnotic shots and a tension found almost on par with Polanski in the first half of the film confirmed the Canadian, just 24, as one of the festival grounds’ earliest talents. But the complex psychological story, an adaptation of the play by Michel Marc Bouchard, was a bit washed out at the end, giving us hope that ten years later Dolan would have taken on that challenge, with enough maturity to round out a landmark work in very good ways.
That decade has already passed and the filmmaker, who has been in a deep creative crisis for some time, revisits Bouchard’s universe in his television debut to revisit his compatriot’s peculiar mix of genres and themes. And well, an intense and profound journey through the mysteries and polyhedral fears of a dysfunctional family culminates successfully in five chapters of the mini-series The Night Logan Awoke (available in Spain from the Filmin catalogue).
Tragedy strikes the fate of an entire family when, in the early 1990s, an abrupt disagreement shatters the deep childhood friendship that brothers Julienne and Mireille Larouche had with their neighbor Laurier, aka Logan. The event returns in the life of the clan almost 30 years later, coinciding with the death of its matriarch Madeleine – a particularly great Anne Dorval, Dolan’s fetish mother in many of his works. Both she and her two youngest children, Denis and Elliot, indirectly paid for the consequences of that fateful night, about which they do not know the truth. With a time warp, both the characters and viewers will rebuild the emotional mystery of the main family.
Although the Canadian revisits some of his recurring themes with this story, such as complicated mother-child relationships or the certainties and lies surrounding his protagonists’ sexuality, he does so in a very different tone than in his films. The Night Logan Woke Up is well aware of its status as a segmented television thriller, slow in its revelations and flowery in its subplots. The creator adds several ingredients to the recipe intended to spice up the end result with novelties, such as multiple nods to the horror genre and a haunting soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer and David Fleming. Dolan shows that while staying true to his identity as an author, he remains capable of exploring new narrative territory.
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