Retirement didn’t suit Xavier Dolan, apparently, since he has just announced his next project. Its title has yet to be revealed, but the prodigious filmmaker describes it as “takes place in 1895 in the world of the elite, the Parisian literary world and in the countryside too.”
Dolan announced his retirement in July of last year, expressing in no uncertain terms his dismay at the state of global affairs, telling GQ France that “the world is burning,” and the Spanish outlet El Pais that “Art is useless and dedicating oneself to the cinema, a waste of time.” Even more revealing, in the same interview with GQ Dolan evoked Hayao Miyazaki, noting that the legendary Japanese animator and filmmaker once “said that making films only brought suffering,” before poignantly adding, “And that’s true.”
As admirably candid and understandable as his reasoning was (filmmaking is hard man), Dolan’s return is hardly surprising as he is also an inescapably passionate auteur who was only 34 at the time of this announcement, and had released eight films in a ten-year period, with his most recent feature being 2019’s Matthias & Maxime, though he also made a limited TV series The Night Logan Woke Up, which released in 2022. While this kind of output no doubt contributed to his jaded disposition at the time – not to mention the crushingly negative reviews for his first and only English-language production, 2018’s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan – it also speaks to his sheer love of cinema, and Dolan admitted that he is only truly motivated “when the urgency of the next project was so strong that it made me forget about what came afterwards.”
Well, clearly this latest project has not only put Dolan’s near future on hold in the name of filmmaking, but also rekindled his passion and drive for the craft just over a year after his retirement, while telling an attendee at a recent masterclass at the Lumiere Film Festival (as reported by Variety) that “Cinema is a way of escaping this world” for him now.
While Dolan has offered up a surprisingly concise description of his unnamed project’s setting, the type of film it will be has been discussed in much broader terms by the famously enigmatic filmmaker. At this masterclass, Dolan further elaborated that there are “certainly horrific aspects or moments” in the film, though he stopped short of describing it as an outright horror, a genre with which he is not entirely unfamiliar, having written and directed the psychological thriller Tom at the Farm in 2013 which showcases Dolan’s underrated ability to generate tension beyond that of the dramatic sort.
The picture is seemingly made even clearer when he notes that there will also be a “lot of comic elements,” as horror and comedy are more intrinsically connected than one might think. Jordan Peele once fascinatingly remarked that the only element separating the two genres is the music, and some of the greatest horrors of all time feature strong comedic or satirical elements, such as Evil Dead 2, Scream, or Peele’s Get Out. However, Dolan also told them that “It’s going to be an amalgam of several genres,” and given Dolan’s unapologetic, hyper-stylised approach to filmmaking – sometimes to a fault – any attempt to challenge the conventions of genre would comfortably align with his idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking.
Little else is otherwise known about Xavier Dolan’s first feature film since Matthias & Maxime, only that he intends to begin production some time in 2025 with a script that has already been completed.