The Night Logan Woke Up

Writer and Director: Xavier Dolan

The Night Logan Woke Up is a French Canadian mini-series by Xavier Dolan first released in 2022. Based on a stage play by Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, it’s an intensely gothic family drama. Under Dolan’s direction, its deliberately disorientating, cutting regularly between the present and scenes set in the past, mainly of events that happened 28 years previously. Everything points to some incident that has evidently ruined the lives of all four Larouche siblings. Seedy Elliot, played by Dolan himself, is just out of rehab and seems to be spiralling back into self-destruction. As he’s the youngest by many years, he serves a useful expository purpose, needing key plot points to be explained to him. We might wonder why, given the passage of time, he hasn’t sought clarification earlier. It’s only in Episode 3, for example, that he asks who exactly Logan Goodyear is. It’s a question we might be wondering too. We’ve been told Goodyear raped the 14-year-old Mimi Larouche when he was 16, but hear nothing much more till this mid-point in the series.

In other words, it’s generally hard to get a handle on the plot in the course of an overblown five hours of viewing. Presumably the stage play was more concise and therefore clearer. Dolan’s interest is less in explaining what’s going on and more in creating a heightened sense of mystery and fear. The event which sets it all in motion is the death of the matriarch, Maddy, a powerful widow. Views of her deliberately conflict. Was she the mother they all adored, or was she some sort of tyrant? We are given a fair amount of evidence, as flash backs feature Anne Dorval in a lively performance as Maddy over the years. But spoiler alert – the question is never fully resoled. We are invited to speculate on other questions. Why, for instance, has only daughter Mimi, aka Mireille (Julie Le Breton) returned after all these years? She is unsurprisingly damaged by the rape, but presumably we are meant to see her character as darkly comic rather than tragic. This is because her profession is that of undertaker, which at least since Six Feet Under has been a signifier of hilarity. Also hilarious is her thing for kinky sex – we see her texting a future hook-up that she is soft BDSM – but that goes sour when one of the young men she commandeers turns nasty.

Each of the siblings battles demons. Julian (Patrick Hivon) has a tense marriage to Chantal (Magalie Lépine Blondeau). He tries, without success, to relieve his tension with alcohol and loveless sex with prostitutes. We sense the root of the problem lies in that fatal teenage summer, but Dolan deliberately keep us in the dark about the reason for his fractured relationship with his sister, Mimi. Middle brother Denis is played by Eric Bruneau, who bears a passing resemblance to Keanu Reeves. Eric is separated from his wife and two daughters. He is regularly caught in a state of undress in his squalid apartment, feverishly tidying up before he takes a video call from them. Quite what his larger issues are, however, is never quite spelled out.

Some of the plot lines are frankly weird. For instance, despite her mother-in-law’s death, Chantal insists on going ahead planning her own surprise 40^th birthday party, even though Maddy has yet to be laid to rest. In fact she is still lying in the funeral parlour, being attended to by Mireille. This attention includes a full manicure (touching) following the breaking of Maddy’s clawed fingers (weird).

Then there’s the whole question of who exactly Logan is. We get a glimpse of him in one of the early scenes, but will probably struggle to work out his importance to the plot until the final episode. The revelation when it comes is not such a revelation after all, and to get us there, Dolan has had to practice some narrative duplicity.

Things are more or less resolved by the rather sentimental ending. We do at least find out the significance of the old biscuit tin and its contents. But the promising plot line about Maddy’s will – and why the siblings are banned from attending the reading of it – simply disappears.

The music has a good pedigree, composed in part by Hans Zimmer. But it’s used with far too heavy a hand in endless scenes where characters stare out bleakly, lost in thought.

The series won awards in Canada, but one suspects, especially given the delay in its release, it’s unlikely to make much of an impact more widely.

The Night Loganwill be available to stream exclusively on STUDIOCANAL Presents from 1st November