After the death of her husband, Diane decides to place her violent and unmanageable son Steve in a center for difficult adolescents. A few years later, after an incident in which he seriously wounds a friend, Steve is sent home. The reunion between the unrestrained mother and her troubled son is stormy, and they clash brutally even as they both share an intense bond. Then they meet their neighbor Kyla, a former teacher, who is feeling suffocated by her family and helps the two find a balance…

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Between assertive hatred and limitless admiration, Xavier Dolan stirs things up to the point of excess. The result is spectacular, bombastic onscreen energy, accompanied by a constant explosion of color and filmed like an endless, climactic clip. Along the same vein as I Killed My Mother and again starring the excellent Anne Dorval and co-starring Suzanne Clément, another muse of the director, who won at Cannes in 2012 for her wonderful performance in Laurence Anyways. Unfortunately, despite a few flashes of brilliance, Mommy brings nothing new to Dolan’s career, animated as it is by the same formal energy, obsessed by the same details and inhabited by the same adolescent contradictions. Neither awful nor captivating, his fifth movie, which tied for the Jury Prize in Cannes with Godard’s Adieu au langage, reinforces Dolan’s already established position without confirming any of his promise.