MOMMY (Xavier Dolan)

In a Canada where a law allows children with behavioral problems to be institutionalized without judicial process, Diane, a widowed mother, tries to raise Steve alone—an impulsive and violent teenager living on the edge of explosion. Between outbursts, tenderness, and a neighbor who becomes unexpected support, mother and son search for a way to survive together in a world that seems to have no place for them.

Law S-14 in Canada allows a mother to institutionalize her son without legal proceedings.

This detail is not just context: it is a latent threat. A possible way out. Or a surrender.

Diane, “Die,” lives as if everything happened to her too early. Widowhood. Precarity. Adulthood without a safety net. And Steve, her son, who feels more like an adolescent companion than a child. They share a boundless, almost electric energy. She wears flowers, shouts, seduces, and defends herself. He explodes. They love each other with an intensity that knows no bounds.

The film begins with a car crash. We see it through Kyla's eyes, the neighbor. This position is not accidental: we are spectators inside another spectator. No one helps. No one approaches. Die manages on her own. Always on her own.

Kyla watches from her window. She stutters. She lives in a blue, cold, orderly house. Across the street, Die and Steve’s apartment burns in yellows and reds. Two opposing worlds: excess and containment. Noise and suffocation. In one, there is too much impulse; in the other, too much control.

Dolan encloses everything in a square frame. The image is a cage. There is no air around the characters. They barely fit. The form is not a whimsical aesthetic gesture; it is the short breath of that relationship. It is 2014, when the square began colonizing our daily gaze. But here it is not fashion—it is a limit.

Steve carries the weight of his father’s death. But more than physical absence, something else weighs: the lack of a limit that orders desire. His bond with his mother is intense, ambiguous, and possessive. He cannot tolerate frustration. He experiences everything as an attack. The world feels offensive to him. And he responds with violence or euphoria.

There are uncomfortable moments—when he dances, when he invades Die’s body—that need no explanation. Something is out of joint. It is not perversion in a moral sense. It is a lack of edge. A lack of separation.

Die tries to be both mother and father at once. She wants to discipline him, but she has not managed to discipline her own impulses. Deep down, she believes love is enough. That they can abstract themselves from the world. If they love each other enough, nothing will touch them.

And yet the world insists.

When Kyla begins helping Steve with his studies, something opens. Literally. The image expands as he, euphoric, pushes the frame’s borders with his hands. The screen breathes. There is a future. There is work. There is dinner as a family. It is a fragile, almost miraculous moment.

Then it closes again.

The film does not need grand catastrophes. A bad piece of news is enough. A reminder that the system does not forgive what does not fit. That precarity is not only economic—it is structural.

There is a scene set to music by Ludovico Einaudi that functions like a dream. A montage of what could be: studies, a partner, stability. A future imagined with unbearable sweetness. It hurts because we believe it is possible. It hurts because we know it is not quite so.

In an argument, Die tells Steve: “My only problem is you.” The line weighs more than any diagnosis. A truth slips through that no one wants to admit: love does not save. And sometimes the child is also the mother’s wound.

Law S-14 then returns as a real option. Institutionalize him. Hand him over. Pretend it is for his own good. Is it an act of love or exhaustion? Protection or abandonment?

The film does not turn Steve into a monster or a pure victim. Nor Die into a tragic heroine. Rather, it shows how a system that celebrates self-sufficiency ends up blaming the individual when he cannot adapt. As if everything were a matter of will. As if desire did not need limits, nor a freedom structure.

In the end, an uncomfortable question remains: Was Steve born maladjusted, or was he slowly pushed to the margins? And how much of that expulsion has to do with lack of resources, with loss, with the illusion that love can replace any law?

Dolan does not answer. He closes the frame. He returns us to Kyla’s window.

We watch.

And something in us remains enclosed there.

Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014)