TOM AT THE FARM (TOM A LA FERME) World Cinema

Director Xavier Dolan is only 24 years old, but this is his fourth feature, and all of his previous films have played at AFI FEST. The newly blond Dolan stars as Tom, a young gay man who travels to a farm in rural Quebec for the funeral of his lover. What Tom finds at the farm is a family in denial – a mother unaware that her son was gay, and a homophobic brother desperate to keep the truth about his brother from surfacing at all costs. The atmosphere is teeming with violence, but Tom does not leave. Dolan stirs the pot by fearlessly diving in to explore the nature and depth of love, desire, passion and pain. He brings elements of the Hitchcoockian thriller, horror and noir genres into the mix through the score, cinematography and key plot points. TOM AT THE FARM is an ambitious and emotionally complex portrait of compulsion and grief.