The wunderkind disappoints – but Cassel may take Best Actor: Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World reviewed

‘This day fucking sucks,’ remark several characters over the course of Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World. It’s hard to argue with them. Recriminations, ugly behaviour and shitty attitudes are par for the course in this dysfunctional family drama.

A young, gay playwright named Louis returns home after 12 years to his family to announce that he is dying, probably of AIDS, although that word is never mentioned. His emotional roller coaster of a homecoming lasts a grand total of five hours, as he tries to reconnect with his nervous, oblivious mother, the younger sister whose adolescence he missed and takes heaps of abuse from his brutish older brother. Louis suffers and we suffer along with him, in the Canadian wunderkind’s wrenching and suffocating new film. It plays like something Ingmar Bergman and Tennessee Williams might have cooked up over a couple of drinks.

Dolan has made six films by the ripe age of 27.