In Who by Fire (Comme le feu), Jeff (Noah Parker), a young man and aspiring filmmaker, accompanies his best friend Max's (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon) family for the week to a remote Canadian Shield cottage owned by Blake Cadieu (Arieh Worthalter), a kind-of-washed documentarian who used to make narrative features with his friend's father, Albert (Paul Ahmarani). In line with the trappings of a typical coming-of-age film, Jeff is in love with Max's older sister, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), a budding writer herself.
The logline of the film alone conjures images of warm wood interiors, getting hazily wine drunk by a fireplace, wholesome camaraderie set against the backdrop of burgeoning young love. However, veteran French Canadian director Phillippe Lesage imbues his latest film with an undercurrent of darkness so potent that it makes us second guess every kind gesture, every smile shared between friends.
We spend the first few minutes following a vintage Mercedes-Benz down a lonely stretch of highway surrounded by luscious, green forest. As Aliocha ventures into the woods on a pit stop, this idyllic landscape is fragmented with the image of a logging mill hard at work. Massive, yellow machinery moves fallen trees to and fro, and it's the first of many instances where Lesage demonstrates what horrible damage humans can cause, not just to nature, but also to one another.
Anchored by great performances, two deserve to be singled out: Paul Ahmarani's Albert and Aurélia Arandi-Longpré's Aliocha. A role like Albert's, in worse hands, has the potential to be grating — at his core, Albert radiates insecurity and righteousness — but Ahmarani instead portrays a flawed but good man, fraying in the face of betrayal at the hands of one of his oldest friends.
Arandi-Longpré has the thankless task of being the object of Jeff's desire. The camera pays particular attention to her accordingly, yet Arandi-Longpré doesn't balk from this precise focus, instead rising to the occasion. Her performance feels lived-in and recognizable, and to a certain extent, this story becomes as much hers as it is Jeff's — a difficult feat as the film filters through his perspective alone.
There's a level of predictability to the plot, but we arrive at these events often unexpectedly, or by taking weird detours that recall Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Outside of the core five characters — and even then, Max barely figures — a collection of veritable strays fill Blake's cottage: a chef, a spare friend, an editor, and a French actress and her husband. Like Max, they are mostly mute, or exist to simply advance the story. Emilie (Sophie Desmarais), the editor on Blake's latest documentary, brings a taut but nervous energy that goes nowhere (what has she seen as Blake's closest collaborator?), a figurative Chekhov's gun that never fires. These extraneous characters clutter the cottage almost uselessly, but it begs the question as to whether they are there to bear witness as we are.
In a parallel universe, Who by Fire would be a tired chamber drama, but thankfully, in our universe, Lesage elevates the material with sneaky technical prowess. Many scenes contain long single shots, whether an argument around the dinner table between Albert and Blake or when everyone jams out to the B-52's "Rock Lobster" with abandon. In this way, cinematographer Balthazar Lab builds a common visual language that serves the tension of the story well, and never once does he become overly reliant on this vocabulary so as to leave us bored, pulling from a bountiful bag of tricks that somehow evades being gimmicky or too stylistic. A long dinner precedes a shot where the camera follows a character's movements so precisely that it, too, will double back as the character does, making both of these instances feel equally dynamic and alive.
During these dinners, nearly every character's face remains visible for the full duration of the scene, most of which last close to 10 minutes. It's a lot to ask of the cast to be reactive in such a sustained way, and the results are supremely rewarding. Lesage not only achieves a naturalistic texture in the movie, but every wince from the audience cuts that much deeper as the characters grow more and more uncomfortable when Albert and Blake dole out their lashings. A clichéd shot/reverse-shot surely would have been easier to film, but Lesage's approach leaves us in as much suspense as the characters as to when all the yelling will end.
The tension in Who by Fire can be likened to a pot left not unattended, but attended by a very distracted chef. It boils over after one of these blow-ups, and fleetingly reduces to a simmer before the water reaches the brim once again — a welcome change to waiting until the third act for something real to happen, or hours of furtive glances and vague suggestions of ulterior motives. As personalities and histories clash, there is a delight to the mess that befalls our characters, as though we're Romans jeering inside the Colosseum. Lesage isn't so meek as to leave his audience unsatisfied; rather, he leaves us bloodthirsty.