Cannes 2025 Review: PEAK EVERYTHING, Love in the Time of Climate Crisis and Mental Anxiety

Adam (Patrick Hivon) lives alone with his dogs, long silences, and unhurried afternoons in Peak Everything, a Canadian romantic comedy by Anne Émond. He operates a modest kennel on the outskirts of an unnamed town bordered by industrial remnants and dry, open fields. His is a quiet kind of crisis: hypersensitive, chronically anxious, and depressive.

One day, in an effort to manage his eco-anxiety, Adam orders a solar lamp. He does not anticipate that a call to technical support will connect him with Tina (Piper Perabo), a woman whose voice quietly reorients his emotional world.

Peak Everything is Émond’s sixth feature and continues the thematic trajectory of her earlier work, which has explored emotional isolation and internal conflict. While her previous films often favored somber naturalism or elliptical character studies, Peak Everything introduces surreal and comedic elements into its portrayal of psychological and emotional vulnerability.

Peak Everything is a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of a slow-burning collapse, what could be described as a pre-apocalyptic rom-com, as suggested by its French title, Amour Apocalypse. Adam is submissive, hypersensitive, and so consumed by anxiety that even his teenage intern, Romy (Élizabeth Mageren), is bossing him around, calling him a neurodivergent man in the throes of a midlife crisis. The character aligns with a familiar archetype: the melancholic loner designed to invite sympathy, reinforced by his care for a pack of dogs and his concern over mankind and ecological decline.

Émond situates the film in a deliberately ambiguous setting with retro-futuristic aesthetics. Smartphones are notably absent, and the central romance unfolds over a traditional landline call to customer support, a stylistic choice that not only evokes a certain old-world charm but also reflects the film’s appeal to an older demographic.

Peak Everything is, at its core, a middle-aged romantic comedy intertwined with a coming-of-middle-age tale, charting emotional recalibration rather than first encounters. While Adam’s characterization fits the familiar mold of the sad sack, Tina contends with more grounded, adult concerns as a married mother of two. Through her, Émond introduces themes related to family life and the dilemmas of middle age.

Adam is far from an alpha male; his character borders on a caricature of contemporary fragile masculinity. Tina, meanwhile, offers a counterbalance. Though drawn to Adam’s childlike vulnerability, she is also navigating her own complications; her husband represents another kind of masculine cliché, marked by detachment and control.

Sandwiched between these contrasting male figures, Tina becomes the emotional center of the film. Her role is shaped by the tension between outdated and fragile forms of masculinity. Adding to this dynamic is Adam’s father, Eugène (Gilles Renaud), a figure rooted in 20th-century paternal norms, largely indifferent to his son’s emotional states and unresponsive even in moments of acute crisis.

The film's title refers to a moment during Adam’s session with his therapist, when he becomes overwhelmed and delivers an exaggerated monologue about the convergence of global crises, climate, economic, emotional, all reaching their peak simultaneously. His spiral culminates into a breakdown which earns him a hefty dose of pharmaceuticals.

Peak Everything is a romantic comedy that brushes shoulders with black humor, mostly in understated ways, with occasional touches of surrealism. The film’s central twist arrives with the revelation that Tina, the voice on the phone, is not an artificial intelligence or chatbot, but a real woman, adding a layer of irony to Adam’s emotional investment.

Émond follows familiar beats in the story arc but introduces occasional digressions that serve both to enliven the story and deepen the lead characters’ development. These diversions function as narrative devices, allowing Adam and Tina to edge closer to a connection that gestures toward soulmate territory, despite the emotional weight they each carry into midlife. One of the more peculiar detours involves their inadvertent entanglement in a botched drug bust that targets a conspiracy-minded petty dealer who is a flatearther.

Peak Everything includes brief moments of melodrama, a familiar feature in the genre, used sparingly to evoke emotional resonance. More unexpectedly, the film introduces moments of gravity, such as Adam’s encounter with Tina’s self-harming daughter, which adds a darker, more grounded layer to the story.

These tonal shifts create a subtle oscillation between levity and weight, turning the film into a restrained emotional ride. The dissonant tonal registers make Peak Everything a subdued emotional ride, blending comic lightness with the weight of adulthood, strained relationships, and the broader crises shaping life in the 21st century.