by Hudson Moura
Throughout Peak Everything (Amour Apocalypse) Anne Émond saturates the narrative with what we could call an immanent critique of wellness: instead of mocking lamps, guided meditations, diagnoses à la carte or “take-care-of-yourself” mantras, she simply lets them accumulate on screen until their limits become audible. The film repeats the very tools meant to soothe climate anxiety — apps, light therapy, therapeutic scripts — and, by repeating them, makes us hear the gap between promise and lived despair. It is a kind of deadpan, Brecht-tinged irony: the calm voice that should heal is what finally exposes how overmediated, overdiagnosed and under-cared-for this generation of eco-melancholic Québécois actually is.
Adam (Patrick Hivon) lives in northern Québec, in a mining town, working in a kennel — already a place on the edge of things. He is a regular guy, in a region where people still think in terms of work, land, and weather. And yet he is overwhelmed. He feels the end of the world coming — climate change, ecological collapse, too much catastrophic news — and nobody around him, especially not his father, understands what that anxiety is about. The generational gap is sharp: for his father’s generation, the world doesn’t “end,” it just keeps going; for Adam, it is perfectly rational to be sad in advance and mourns the world as we know it.
To lift his mood he buys a daylight lamp. With the lamp comes a phone number. He calls, thinking it’s a help line. It’s only a technical-support line. That little mistake says everything: we reach technology faster than we reach care. But on the other end he finds Tina (Piper Perabo), who, by chance, is living the same climate dread. From there the film becomes a long, hesitant connection between two people who are tired of hearing “the planet is dying” every 30 seconds and who don’t want to be called crazy for taking it seriously.
Émond stages wonderfully the scene with the therapist: she “diagnoses” Adam by going through the letters of his name and changing the diagnosis as he talks. It is funny and a bit sad: our era produces anxiety about the future, and then produces a whole industry of pills, guided meditations, S.A.D. lamps, affirmations and “you have to take care of yourself” speeches to keep us functional. The film doesn’t attack antidepressants or sleeping pills frontally, but it clearly shows how these tools can become a crutch — they reassure us or they numb us, instead of helping us to act. Numbing becomes both symptom and survival. Climate change here is not a storm on screen, it is a storm in people’s heads.
The North of Canada is the right place for this story: vast, cold, lightly populated — becomes a space where climate grief has room to be articulated. A geography to think, to despair, or just to be melancholic about the future. With the current speed of information, any small natural disaster anywhere in the world enters Adam’s living room in seconds. When everything becomes a sign of the end, the discourse itself becomes repetitive, almost hypnotic, and it can push people into a kind of social sleepwalking. That is very much the film’s point: constant alerts can end up emptying the alert of its meaning.
When Adam and Tina finally meet, what binds them is precisely their “weird” way of seeing the world: distrust of humanity, exhaustion in front of climate talk, and the feeling of being alone in seeing how fragile everything is. The film says: yes, this is a very contemporary obsession, and yes, it can paralyze us — mais il y a quand même un demain. That tiny thread of hope is there.
When everything is peaking (emissions, temperatures, inequality, information), feeling too much can end in feeling nothing. It is a modest film, more about mood than plot, but it offers an unusually accurate portrait of people who are not sick in the classical sense — they are simply lucid, overloaded, and living in a time where even self-care can become another dependence.
The film’s plot is thin and the story stays almost entirely at the level of sensation — sadness, weariness, recognition — and only brushes the political textures of climate change (extractive towns, generational responsibility, corporate denial). But as a portrait of contemporary eco-melancholy in Québec — and of two people who, by accident, refuse to drown alone — it is observant, gentle, and quietly critical and ironic. 
Rating: 4/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 