43° TFF - Ailleurs la Nuit (Elsewhere at Night) di Marianne Métivier (Canada, 2025)

Review by Clara Bruno – 30 November 2025 Reading time: 2 minutes

Film seen at TFF – Cinema Massimo on 30 November 2025

Running time: 105’

Feature Film Competition

Winner of the Best Screenplay Award5

Ailleurs la nuit, the debut feature by Québécois–Filipino director Marianne Métivier, aims for experiential cinema, but the result is deeply disappointing: the film feels unfinished and directionless. Regrettably, it is far more soporific than evocative. The first protagonist we meet, Marie (Camille Rutherford), a sound artist and researcher fleeing the city’s clamour, comes across as irritatingly disdainful towards her boyfriend Nico (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles), while she wanders through woods and mountains recording the noises of cathartic Nature. The arrival of Noée (Garance Marillier), a young aimless traveller who attracts her (albeit inconclusively), unsettles her relationship with Nico. Equally disconcerted is Yan (Émile Schneider), a solitary farmer who dances alone in the night. Meanwhile, in the city, we struggle to follow (fighting off bouts of drowsiness) the story of Jeanne (Amaryllis Tremblay), a student preparing research precisely on Marie’s work, and Eva (Kyrie Allison Samodio), a Filipino girl who feels lost and sleepless, having moved there with her mother.

The director attempts to weave her narrative through these lives of young women (longing for elsewhere?) by means of a mysterious nocturnal sonic call that seemingly binds them, pushing them towards altered perceptions and a never-fully-achieved sense of belonging. But Métivier, unable to stir any empathy in the viewer, tries to build a web of sensory and spiritual connections, only for everything to dissipate into a bland, indeed inconsistent narrative flow, with very little impact and painfully banal dialogue.

The visual design is fairly polished, yet the terse and fragmented script cannot support the film’s thematic ambition, and the gestures towards sensory cinema remain nothing more than intentions.

Although (inexplicably and undeservedly) awarded for its screenplay, the film fails to convey emotion. In the end, Ailleurs la nuit is a largely pointless cinematic experience, never enlightening. And everything about it, starting with the title, carries a faintly pretentious tone. If the director intended to depict her own identity-driven tension, ranging from nostalgia for the Philippines she never truly experienced to the weight of being a different kind of Québécoise, then I would say she has missed the mark. Her story neither states nor explains; it lacks any meaningful narrative substance. If Métivier aspired to make Nature speak as a character, she has failed, because Nature in her film remains from beginning to end a mere backdrop. The film is deeply unsatisfying, and the award it received is incomprehensible, especially in a competition that included films with genuinely excellent screenplays such as La Anatomía de los Caballos by Daniel Vidal Toche, Black Ox by Tsuta Tetsuichiro, and Todas las Fuerzas by Luciana Piantanida.

lThe protagonist seeks sounds in Nature