Chris Locke and Susan Kent in Who’s Yer Father?Supplied
Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming, with a special edition this week celebrating the nominees of next week’s Canadian Screen Awards.
The Nature of Love (Crave)
With this year’s Canadian Screen Week kicking off May 28, culminating in the Canadian Screen Awards Gala broadcast on the CBC May 31, there is no better time to highlight some of the great CSA-nominated films that (like so many homegrown productions) have flown completely under the radar. While there is a better-than-good chance that readers of this column will be familiar with Matt Johnson’s excellent comedy BlackBerry (which is up for a record-setting 17 awards, including best picture, and likely to take home the bulk of the evening’s hardware), there are a wealth of other nominated productions that deserve your time, too. Starting with The Nature of Love, Quebec director Monia Chokri’s romantic comedy that made its debut at Cannes last year sporting the far better French-language title Simple comme Sylvain. An opposites-attract tale that isn’t afraid to get into the messy details of a relationship, Chokri’s film – up for four CSAs, including best original screenplay – is a confident, sexy heartbreaker.
Red Rooms (Crave)
Draped underneath a thick layer of dread, Pascal Plante’s follow-up to his Cannes-certified drama Nadia, Butterfly is a tremendously effective thriller that gets under your skin. Following two young women’s very different obsessions with a Paul Bernardo-like serial killer (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, perfectly cast as a creep without the actor needing to say a word of dialogue), Red Rooms mixes the modern folklore of the internet with the pulse-pounding tension of a classic whodunit. CSA nominee Juliette Gariépy, playing the more mysterious of the two women who are drawn to a Montreal murder trial, delivers a knockout performance, accenting her character’s ambiguity with the hardest of edges.
Solo (Crave)
Just as drag shows are getting unjustly lobbed into the culture war, Sophie Dupuis’s drama Solo turns the spotlight away from any political red herrings and toward the people whose creativity helps the artistic scene flourish. Following Simon (Théodore Pellerin), a young Montrealer who is the star of his local drag club, the drama balances small moments of quiet intimacy with bright and loud bursts of onstage energy. Neither epic in ambition nor so small that it shrinks from the screen, Solo – which is nominated for four CSAs, including best picture – arrives as an impressive addition to Dupuis’s filmography after the crime drama Chien de garde and the mining-rescue thriller Souterrain. Perhaps even more than that, though, it further proves to English Canada – and the world, hopefully – just what a fiercely talented chameleon Pellerin can be.
Who’s Yer Father? (Paramount+)
The highest-grossing Canadian film to ever open in Charlottetown, Jeremy Larter’s Prince Edward Island comedy is a true from-the-ground-up success story. Following a bumbling private investigator (Chris Locke) as he aims to crack a series of crimes – with at least one run-in with crustacean-trafficking crooks – Who’s Yer Father? balances just the right amount of local colour with crowd-pleasing humour to create something singularly Canadian. Up for three CSAs, including Locke going up against his co-star Susan Kent in the performance in a leading role (comedy) category, Larter’s film proves that the Canadian film industry isn’t (wholly) geographically bound between Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.
Ru (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play)
Charles-Olivier Michaud’s adaptation of Kim Thuy’s bestselling memoir, up for nine CSAs, has a big heart, and bigger ambitions. Rich in period detail and technically slick – a few shots will make you wonder just how large Michaud’s budget was – Ru follows one Vietnamese family’s daily pressures as they adjust to their new lives in rural Quebec. Told primarily through the perspective of 10-year-old Tinh (Chloé Djandji, projecting a believable sense of wide-eyed intimidation), Michaud’s film feels both tender and just tough enough. Featuring strong supporting performances from Chantal Thuy (as Tinh’s mother) and Karine Vanasse (as a Granby resident eager to give the refugees as soft a landing as possible), Ru serves as the best Welcome to Canada ad that Ottawa could hope for.