Starring: Helene Vincent, Garlan Erlos and Ludivine Sagnier
Distributor: Rialto
Runtime: 103 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2025
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This French, subtitled drama tells the story of a retiree’s hopes for her grandson. The hopes are thwarted by tragedy, but come alive again.
Michelle Giraud (Vincent) is a loving grandmother, who is preparing to take her grandson Lucas (Erlos) on a summer vacation in France. Tragedy deals her a blow when Michelle cooks a dish containing poison mushrooms that makes her daughter Valerie (Sagnier) ill, and Valerie takes Lucas away from her and back to Paris.
The film plays out its plot in a pensive way. It raises questions about criminal intent of its main character, Michelle. The movie contrasts Michelle’s life as a gentle, church-going grandmother with that of a dysfunctional woman who resents her adoring grandson being taken away from her. The film is driven less by human perversity than by the cruelty of fate, but viewers are coaxed into wondering about secrets that the film reveals about Michelle’s past; Michelle was once an expensive prostitute. Ozon, the director, shows Michelle wrestling with conflicting emotions that seemingly encompass guilt, defiance, and complacency.
The timeline of the movie spans months and years, and despite the title of the film, the weather doesn’t change. Fall is always coming, but viewers are quickly made aware that it is the temperature of proceedings that radically alters. The film slides seamlessly between a character study of Michelle as a doting grandmother, and as an elderly woman in dark torment. Human nature, rather than seasonal temperature is the volatile element.
In this movie, nobody is exactly who viewers think they might be in a drama essentially about moral contradictions that underlie appearances. This is a film which cleverly unravels what could be lurking underneath seemingly innocuous behaviour. It is a mystery thriller with enigmatic characters living complicated existences. We are never quite certain what makes Valerie’s daughter so hostile, or what really makes Michelle so conflicted. The film is an outwardly comfortable movie, that is inwardly very deceptive. For the most part, the separate pieces of narrative structure merge together, but the essential ambiguity of human behaviour hauntingly lingers under the watchful gaze of Director, Francois Ozon, who has delivered to us a taut mystery thriller that is an expertly modulated piece of well-developed paranoia.
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