‘Mommy’ is a thrilling, absolutely breathtaking piece of cinema
Montreal actor, writer and director Xavier Dolan’s fifth film Mommy is without a doubt one of the best of the year. Although thematically similar to his 2009 debut J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother), which won three separate awards at Cannes that year, Mommy follows the mother’s perspective of the relationship instead of that of the son’s. It is interesting, despite their many parallels, how very different the two films actually are. With Mommy, Dolan not only seems more assured of himself as a filmmaker but appears to have developed into quite an auteur as well. Creating a film so close in theme to his first can be seen as somewhat of a gamble, for many individuals might fear the film to be repetitious, a carbon copy, yet here is where Dolan demonstrates his disturbingly instinctual talent. Because he revisits the mother-son leitmotif in his works, he is strengthening both his storytelling as well as his understanding of the unique relationship. In the five years since his introductory film, he has grown from adolescent to adult, resulting in a shift from youthful intuition to a certain maturity on the subject. The result is downright brilliant.