‘Peak Everything’ Review: Absurdist Quebecois Comedy Tries to Do Too Many Things At Once

Most of us involuntarily limit our daily interaction with the world’s incessant problems, just to preserve our basic sanity. But not Adam (Patrick Hivon), the instantly lovable lead of Anne Émond’s genially (and, sometimes, tediously) absurdist Quebecois tragicomedy “Peak Everything.” It’s not that Adam is stuck in a dysfunctional rut from opening his soul to every single global calamity. On the surface, he has it together: living in a small town by Montreal, keeping a modest but orderly home, dedicatedly running a local kennel full of disarmingly sweet dogs, and so on. Still, something feels off in his soul, and it’s something he cannot seem to fix.

In Émond’s bizarre tale that flirts with surrealism, you can’t help but feel for the hypersensitive Adam. He is one of those incurable nice guys you instantly want to protect, with a pair of kind, puppy-dog eyes that overflow with the pressing anxieties that Hivon’s deeply human performance navigates. Considering how consumed Adam is day in and day out with planet Earth’s expiration date and his fellow human beings’ indifference to urgent environmental causes, it’s anyone’s guess how he keeps his head above water. But he manages all the same, despite his hard-bitten father Eugène (Gilles Renaud), who insensitively doesn’t share his concerns, and an assistant at the kennel named Romy (Élizabeth Mageren, making the most of her undeveloped comic-relief part), who freely manipulates Adam as she wishes.

There is no doubt that his dogs help Adam a great deal in the midst of his existential crisis, as man’s best friends do. Still, he orders a therapy lamp for additional support when his canine company and therapist prove insufficient. In perhaps the best and funniest scene of “Peak Everything” — a film that otherwise could have used sharper humor — he meets the chipper Tina (Piper Perabo) on the phone when he dials the lamp’s support line, thinking it’s on-demand emotional support that the manufacturer also provides on the side. But it turns out that Tina is just an ordinary customer tech support, perhaps a little overeager to engage with Adam’s problems.

Kindred spirits connected by chance, the two hit it off instantly despite the initial misunderstanding, with Émond briefly making the viewer wonder whether Tina is real, or if we’re in the neighborhood of Spike Jonze’s “Her.” Émond gently teases this suggestion via her sound design choices — there is almost a mechanic sweetness and alarming aural clarity to Tina’s voice — as well as Perabo’s otherworldly vocal performance until we see her.

“Peak Everything” becomes considerably less interesting and peaks early when it turns out that we are supposed to take most things in the film at face value. (For one, Tina is quite real.) Still, Émond maintains some intrigue when Adam overhears an earth-shattering thunderstorm on the phone while talking to Tina, and journeys to her neck of the woods in Ontario when an earthquake threatens her safety. The plotting is admittedly shaky from here on out, especially when Adam and Tina become part of an inexplicable drug bust that detracts from the story. And once we meet Tina’s family — she is married and has children — the detours the script takes through these new characters feel haphazard and undercooked. There is a slight suggestion that Tina’s marital bliss might not be all that, and she needed the chance connection as much as Adam did. But for the most part, Tina remains a frustrating question mark.

Émond is more successful elsewhere, teasing an undercurrent of sadness that lingers just beneath the film’s shiny and handsomely shot surface. Era-blending production design (without the technology and smart devices in the film, you wouldn’t be able to tell what decade we’re in) complements the story’s ethereal feel, while the locations juxtapose calm and quaint spaces against industrial plants and smoking chimneys, echoing Adam’s split headspace. Meanwhile, his dreamlike excursions to snowy, meditative landscapes often ground the story in a quieter environment, even when Émond overplots her tale’s ecosystem with various forgettable side characters and throwaway situational comedy.

You do wonder whether the overcrowded feel of “Peak Everything” involuntarily mimics the phenomenon that the title refers to — a uniquely 21st-century crisis when humankind and our planet are reaching the limit of everything by overconsumption. The characters often feel like they have hit a narrative endpoint, but they still keep going and overstaying their welcome — sometimes even betraying their own belief systems in the process. (An inexplicable scene towards the end that has to do with a natural disaster and Adam’s beloved dogs is a perfect example of this.) If only the film had the discipline to dial back on some of its thematic ambitions around romance, action, comedy and existentialism, and knew how to quit while ahead.