Movies Aren’t Real Life, But Who by Fire Comes Pretty Close

One could be forgiven for mistaking the opening scenes of Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire for the start of a horror movie. The film begins with a long, looong shot of a car driving along a remote, winding road as a droning, two-note melody plays on the soundtrack. The silent close-ups of the people in the vehicle are subtly unsettling, while all around them rolls a beautiful, forbidding landscape. Complete with lengthy, ominous dissolves, it really does feel like an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Now playing in New York (and hopefully expanding in coming weeks), Lesage’s hypnotic film isn’t a horror movie at all — it’s a drama, though at times it’s also a comedy — but the Quebecois director understands tension and anticipation. Who by Fire follows a few people gathering at a cabin in the woods, along with the emotional wreckage that ensues. It doesn’t have a typical story, nor does it have the kind of clearly outlined themes and structure that would usually tell us what to look for and what to think, whom to hate and whom to admire.

What it does have are characters that the writer-director loves to bounce off each other in sequences that feel like concentrated stretches of real life. Dinner conversations ramble on and become contentious confrontations, often captured in single shots. Some dialogue exchanges even edge into the realm of cringe comedy, without ever going full-bore Apatow. People wander into the night, and then they keep going. Lesage’s scenes extend well beyond conventional limits. Clocking in at 155 minutes, Who by Fire is not short. But it captures the imprecise language and ungainly rhythms of reality so well that you lose sense of time. After I first saw it at the New York Film Festival last year, if you told me the movie was 90 minutes long, I’d have believed you; I’d also have believed you if you said it was four hours long.

The cabin in question is a well-appointed one, belonging to an acclaimed filmmaker, Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), who has awards on the shelf and a hard-on for outdoorsy pursuits like bow hunting and fly fishing and white-water rafting. Visiting him are his old friend and writing partner, Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), an anxious intellectual who arrives with his daughter, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré); his son, Max (Antoine Marchand Gagnon); and Max’s friend Jeff (Noah Parker). Albert and Blake, we understand, haven’t seen each other in quite some time, and old resentments gradually emerge through their wine-fueled interactions, as Blake’s macho theatrics collide with Albert’s defensive gabbiness. Meanwhile, Jeff finds himself quite taken with Aliocha, whose kindness and physical ease around him he initially mistakes for romantic interest; his submerged adoration clashes with her terse unreadability. The grown-ups are mired in bitter memories of the past, while the kids seem on the verge of forging some future bitterness of their own.

But that’s too pat a way of describing something so slippery and alive. Because Lesage doesn’t foreshadow his narrative throughlines, we’re even more adrift than usual. And despite its ambling, almost shapeless nature, Who by Fire is never boring, because Lesage and his actors fill every scene with surprise and suspense. An exchange might dance around buried offenses and then explode in a torrent of pettiness. A casual comment might cause a horrid wound, while a bolder statement gets shrugged off.

The director fixes his lens on these people, watching them intently, sometimes with long, locked-off static shots — the way a scientist might in a lab, but without the antiseptic ruthlessness that suggests. Lesage’s style hovers somewhere between the work of John Cassavetes and Michael Haneke, two extremes you’d think would be unreconcilable. The results are exacting, but ambiguous. And immersive, too: Who by Fire was shot partly with Panavision lenses from the 1970s, and the widescreen photography is vibrant and gorgeous, with warm interiors, rich exteriors, and shimmering night scenes.

At one point during that aforementioned opening sequence, even before we meet the characters, we see close-ups of Aliocha and Jeff’s hands, just close enough to touch. His seems to move ever so slightly in her direction; hers grasps the book she’s holding just a bit tighter. The camera lingers on the hands, and we mull these nearly imperceptible movements. They could mean nothing, or they could mean the world. All of Who by Fire exists in this in-between space, which is what makes it so thrilling, so unpredictable. We keep waiting for something awful to happen. That something turns out to be life.