I Killed My Mother

Dolan has Jenny Lumet’s rare talent for cannily transplanting to paper how people use language as ammunition—how words ricochet during squabbles in unpredictable ways and reveal the best and worst in us all. But I Killed My Mother is a film best heard than seen, as the earnest, nimble scrubbiness of Dolan’s screenplay is ill-served by his conceited visuals, an aesthetic mode that feels insecurely borrowed from perfume commercials and the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.

Dolan masterfully negotiates the travails of learning to navigate those emotions, reconciling ourselves as best we can to the people we hate and love. Dolan’s film is visually intricate (alternating between warmly-lit tableaux and cinema vérité black-and-white footage) and droll, while being emotionally affecting. Quite frankly, this is one of the best directorial debuts I’ve seen in quite some time…

No literal murder takes place in this energetic character piece, but the relationship between mother (Anne Dorval, superb) and son seethes with enough mutual acrimony, complicated by fleeting bursts of real tenderness, that it’s a wonder neither one of them keels over from sheer exhaustion…