Peak Everything

Writer-director Anne Émond (Night #1, TIFF ’11) has reinvented the romantic comedy for the age of ecological anxiety. Winsomely pairing Patrick Hivon (TIFF ’17’s Les affamés) and Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly), Peak Everything suggests that there is no better time to open your heart than when the world seems on the cusp of collapse.

Despite his regimen of exercise and antidepressants, Adam (Hivon), proprietor of a Quebec kennel, cannot help but despair over the ever-escalating climate catastrophe. One night, while feeling especially hopeless, he calls the tech support line for his newly acquired therapeutic desk lamp, believing it to be a crisis help line. He gets lucky: on the other end is Tina (Perabo), who's relieved to talk about something more meaningful than assembly instructions.

The pair connect over their shared existential worries and, when an earthquake rocks Tina's Ontario town, Adam takes the opportunity to drive there and help this woman he's never seen. Environmental dread brought these two together on the phone, so it's only fitting that a natural disaster prompts them to meet. This sets the couple off on a path of romance and adventure.

Peak Everything is a wild ride, populated by conspiracy-theorizing drug dealers and comically entitled Gen Zers, and offering Adam numerous opportunities to confirm his worst fears about the state of the planet. But at the core of this over-the-top love story are eternal questions about how best to use our time on this Earth, how to truly care for each other — and how to accept ourselves as we are.