Can love prevail when the world is falling apart? That’s the question Québécois filmmaker Anne Émond (Nuit #1) poses in this adventurous hybrid: a climate-crisis romantic comedy. Forty-five-year-old Adam (Patrick Hivon) runs a kennel for rescue dogs but struggles with depression when he can’t imagine humans extending that same rescue instinct to themselves. It’s only when he decides to purchase a therapeutic lamp — falling in love with the customer service operator on the other end of the phone (Piper Perabo) in the process — that he’s shaken out of his torpor. But even that faint flame will face environmental threats…
Peak Everything (the French language title is more evocative: Amour Apocalypse) dares to zigzag from slow burn melancholia to wild slapstick, deadpan absurdism to screwball romance. Writer-director Émond has cited Punch-Drunk Love as an inspiration for the movie’s jarring shifts. It keeps us off balance — just like its unsuspecting soulmates, knocked sideways by love.
Community Partner
Patrick Hivon, Piper Perabo, Connor Jessup, Gilles Renaud, Elizabeth Mageren, Éric K. Boulianne
Canada
2025
In French and English with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Anne Émond, Isil Gilderdale, Emily Harris, Donovan M. Boden, Harland Weiss, James Cunnigham, Dominic Thomas
Producer
Sylvain Corbeil
Screenwriter
Anne Émond
Cinematography
Olivier Gossot
Editor
Anita Roth
Production Design
Sylvain Lemaitre
Original Music
Christophe Lamarche Ledoux
Anne Émond
Anne Émond lives and works in Montreal. Since 2005, she has written and directed seven short films and five features including Night #1 (2011), which received a Jury Special Mention at TIFF and Best Canadian Feature Film Award at VIFF; Our Loved Ones, which was included in TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten for 2015; and Young Juliet (2019), winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Screenplay and Audience Choice Award at CIFF; among others. Her sixth film, Peak Everything (2025), premiered at the 57th Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cabourg Film Festival.
Filmography: Nuit #1 (2011); Our Loved Ones (2015); Nelly (2016); Young Juliette (2019); Lucy Grizzli Sophie (2024)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Late Fame
Based on a novella by Arthur Schnitzler (Eyes Wide Shut) this is a sly, poignant comedy about vanity and art from director Kent Jones, starring Willem Dafoe as a mailman belatedly acclaimed for a book of poetry he wrote in his youth.
Memory of Princess Mumbi
In 2093, a filmmaker arrives in the African village of Umata, where he meets Princess Mumbi, a woman torn between love, legacy, and the future of storytelling. It's a fabulous genre-blending fable about memory, invention and cinematic resistance.
Lessons of Darkness
Werner Herzog's unforgettable documentary reveals the unfolding disaster of the Kuwaitian oil fields in flames in 1991 as a sweeping inferno of mesmerizing power.
Beau Travail
Inspired by Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Claire Denis' transfixing Beau Travail is set in East Africa. Sgt Galoup (Denis Lavant) reflects on his time in the French Foreign Legion, and the impact of the handsome Sentain (Gregoire Colin).
But I'm a Cheerleader
Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is the perfect All-American Girl, or so she thinks. That is until she’s shipped off to conversion therapy. This pitch black comedy is wrapped in a saccharine bow, featuring the icon herself, RuPaul, as a conversion counsellor.