Written and directed by Anne Émond
Adam is a timid man. An anxious man, and a lonely man. He worries about the climate and the inevitable change of the world for the worse, the tipping point where all that is familiar is lost and the modest life he’s built for himself will be all he has to show for it.
To dull himself, he has some go-tos: medicine, guided meditation apps, exercise (lots of exercise) and most recently, a light therapy lamp. Then he misreads a friendly note in the box it arrived in from customer service inviting him to call them should anything be amiss, but despite the mix-up, he hits it off with the lady that answers. Maybe things aren’t so bad after all.
Sometimes it’s as simple as that in Peak Everything, a screwball affair that taps into climate anxiety to provide an off-beat romantic comedy borne out of something prevalent and dark.
It’s a comedy with an existential slant, and while Adam as a romantic option is hard to accept, I’m sure he’s not unrecognizable to many who can see some of themselves in a decent, everyday person who’s feeling overwhelmed by all of this: Wars, scarce resources, deteriorating social contracts, and political structures that treats everything as a zero sum game. When Adam almost hyperventilates listing all the catastrophes that will surely come to pass because of our malfeasance, you’ll get a little anxious too. So much for escapism.
The movie won’t cheat you of what’s required of a romcom, this head-over-heels, insane, impractical type of romance, which we somehow crave, but Anne Émond embraces one of the genre’s most tired of tropes: a bubbly woman whose only purpose it is to bring our male protagonist out of his sadsack shell.
As Tina, Piper Perabo is a comforting, accepting voice and later a comforting, accepting person who doesn’t seem to ask much more from Adam than to be on screen. It’s unfair to Perabo, who’s great with what she’s given, and it would have suited Peak Everything to do some more with its second-most important character. There’s simply a void where her internality ought to be.
Peak Everything is enjoyable from start to finish, and it has great ideas, but the filmmaking surrounding it often shrugs to settle for easy, contrived solutions to its storytelling problems, punking out of dealing with what really ails its characters and sometimes distracting itself with filler plotlines that should’ve been shed in the writer’s room.
Émond’s movie is still an engaging acquaintance because of how absurd its protagonist is. As Adam, Patrick Hivon’s mouth seems to hang open in a small tremble, and despite Adam insisting on his eyes being always dry, they never seem far from being salted by tears. Hivon makes plain that Adam is a sweet, but deeply troubled guy, a small pennon twisting at the top of a flagpole with the storm coming in. Émond doesn’t temper him over the course of the movie, letting the movie’s freak flag fly as a whole, playing to its undeniable strength.
An odd-sized romantic comedy for odd-sized times, Peak Everything won’t solve the climate crisis and won’t even solve the issues afflicting it, but it does offer an alternative to the straightlaced, unimaginative, half-churned butter you’ll find clogging up your streaming services.
Mikkel Frederiksen 