Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A peculiar neighbor offers hope to a recent widow who is struggling to raise a teenager who is unpredictable and, sometimes, violent.
Xavier Dolan's Mommy is a visceral, deeply personal portrait of a mother-son relationship pushed to its limits. The acting, particularly Anne Dorval and Antoine-Olivier Pilon, is raw and fearlessly committed, earning a genuine 4. Cinematography is one of the film's most celebrated aspects — Dolan's audacious use of the 1:1 aspect ratio that literally expands during moments of hope and joy is one of cinema's more memorable formal gestures in recent memory. Novelty is high: the film is unmistakably Dolan's — pop music, volatile emotion, candy-colored aesthetics, and formal daring combine into something singular. The ending is devastating and emotionally earned, a prolonged imagined future sequence that makes the grief all the more crushing. The plot itself, while powerful in execution, is somewhat familiar in its dramatic architecture — a struggling single mother, a volatile child, a mysterious neighbor — and keeps this from a 4 in that category.