It's the end of the world and Sudbury, Ontario is 'the last romantic city left on earth'

In Anne Émond's Peak Everything (Amour Apocalypse in French), a lonesome Montrealer struggles with depression. Adam, a kennel owner played by Patrick Hivon, is staring down the end. He's often listening to the violent storms or earthquakes caused by the climate crisis raging just outside his window, or over the other end of a phone call. Or perhaps those sounds are more impressionistic, coming from Adam's own emotional turbulence. His crippling anxiety over the state of the world is at war with a tragic resignation. 

Adam fears the titular apocalypse. But what he's even more afraid of is his own state of mind – that maybe he couldn't even be bothered to save himself if given the chance. That is until the right woman comes along.

Peak Everything is a romantic comedy that premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival. It's also an expression of writer and director Émond's own battle with depression during the recent pandemic, an event that for many of us felt like the end of the world.

"It was brutal," says Émond, recalling that period. "I had more time. More loneliness. I started to read articles, listen to podcasts and I was like, 'oh my God, we are fucked.' We are dying. It's almost over.'"

A friend gave Émond a therapeutic lamp to help her cope — a device that packs sunlight in a box to help cheer up, in particular, Canadians who tend to really feel the January blues.

"I put it on, under my [sun]glasses," Émond recalls. "And under the light, I started to imagine this love story; this very tender and sweet and fun story to first save myself."

We're in Cannes, speaking about depression and apocalyptic conditions, under a canopy on the beach, with sunbathers lounging nearby and yachts overseeing all the action on the Côte d'Azur in the distance. The festival has always provided a stunning contrast between its glitz, glam and sparkling scenery, and the heavier subject matter its films tend to deal with.

On that front, this year's edition, which wraps Sunday, didn't disappoint. Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Lawrence and Rihanna are among the celebs who got the shutterbugs in a frenzy on the red carpet. Meanwhile the films at the festival dealt not only with depression (Peak Everything and Lynne Ramsay's viscerally dire Die, My Love, starring Lawrence and Pattinson) but also police violence and the protests that would erupt around the world (as recounted in French docu-thriller Dossier 137 and satirized in Ari Aster's Eddington) and the ongoing massacre in Gaza (documented in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk).

Émond, who broke out over a decade ago with Nuit #1, another story about a seemingly impossible romance, is cheerily discussing her new film — essentially the French-Canadian answer to Punch-Drunk Love.

"One of the greatest films of the past 25 years," says Emond of Paul Thomas Anderson's whimsical love letter to the French New Wave. "I think this film influenced all my films."

As with Punch-Drunk Love, Amour Apocalypse begins when its depressed and socially awkward entrepreneur receives a package that magically brings relief to his discordant life. This time it isn't a harmonium but the same therapeutic lamp that inspired Émond's story. Adam fancifully forges a connection with a woman named Tina who answers the therapeutic lamp's tech support line, which he mistakenly but serendipitously rings looking for emotional support.

For much of the movie, Tina (Piper Perabo) is just a voice on the other line, like a fantasy figure recalling Punch-Drunk Love's biggest flaw. All the women in that earlier film are thinly drawn, existing only in relation to Adam Sandler's Barry Egan, as either emotional terrorists (Barry's sisters or the phone sex scam operator), or as the tenderly comforting object of affection played by Emily Mortimer, who enters the scene solely to rescue the main character from his anxieties.

Émond is happy to play along in the same mode in Peak Everything, where the women in the film are either objects of affection or frustration, but only up to a point.

"I invented this woman to help me to get better," Émond says, of the Tina character who we gradually discover is married, has children and is messy enough to leave everything behind to pursue a wildly passionate romance to satisfy her own emotional needs.

"At some point, I was feeling better," Émond continues. "And I wanted to tell a true love story. In a true love story, it's two real people, with their problems, flaws and everything. Tina cannot just be a nice voice — sweet and everything. So I was like, 'No, no. She's a mother. Her husband drinks too much. She has problems. I thought it was interesting also that a woman that is 48 years old, can fall in love, go crazy for a man and leave everything behind."

There's another layer to the reckless abandon. Émond doesn't just explore this romance as a hopeful balm during a climate crisis, but also as a Canadian allegory for Anglo-Franco unity.

Adam is from Montreal. He soon discovers that Tina, this sensual and near mystical voice he hears on the other end of the phone, is actually in Sudbury. "The last romantic city in the world," says Émond, chuckling about her cheeky choice of locale.

Émond finds a lot of humour in her inter-provincial romance, taking every opportunity to poke fun at not just at the people who populate her whimsical scenarios but also all of Ontario. When Adam pursues Tina, crossing over into Ontario, he's greeted by a giant Moose statue with a sign reading "Open for Business," the provincial slogan introduced by premiere Doug Ford. "It's so funny," Emond says about the cringey greeting, not realizing it was the Ford government who cooked it up. "Every time I come into Ontario, I'm like 'what a punchline.'"

Emond makes sure to point out that she ridicules with affection and tenderness — whether the punchline is Ontario or her characters. But she also says the romance at the heart of her movie was meant to conjure a sense of Canadian unity, which feels especially pertinent at this moment.

"Canada is funny these days," says Emond. "Since we're becoming the 51st state, we think a lot about what is Canada," she jokes.

Émond, who grew up absorbing deeply separatist influences, parses the two solitudes when it comes to Quebec and the rest of Canada, not just in terms of the social and political, but also the cinema. Quebec films rarely depict the rest of Canada, nor do they often open in theatres outside their own province. And that exclusion often feels like a two way street. Rarely do we get a chance to see what Quebec cinema is cooking up in the rest of Canada, unless of course we fly to Cannes, where our national cinema is represented solely by the work of French-Canadians — as is the case at Cannes 2025. 

Émond's Amour Apocalypse joins Félix Dufour-Laperrière's Death Does Not Exist and the animated shorts Bread Will Walk and Hypersensibility as the Quebecois films raising a maple leaf in Cannes. And she's happy to have her story about an impossible romance between Anglophones and Francophones be representative of some national unity.

"I was like, 'why not,'" says Emond, singing a different tune from her earlier influences. "It's a bilingual country.  It feels strange to be saying that."

"Am I betraying my roots," she asks, before resolving that this is the moment for that evolution. "These days we should stick together."