When Fall Is Coming

Directed by François Ozon

François Ozon's When Fall Is Coming presents itself like a rustic linen tablecloth at a bourgeois garden party—calm, sun-dappled, faintly melancholic. But look closer and you’ll see it’s stained with the slow seep of generational resentment, unspoken traumas, and the quiet, persistent erasure of older women.

At its brittle core is Michelle (Hélène Vincent), a widowed matriarch drifting through the autumn of her life, snipping lavender and swallowing her history like warm tea. She lives in a postcard-pretty Burgundy village, the kind where people still whisper about scandal while pretending to feed chickens. Her closest friend, Marie-Claude (played with boozy pragmatism by Josiane Balasko), provides the only real spark of sisterly solidarity in a film otherwise riddled with silence and avoidance.

When Michelle’s high-strung daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier, always a welcome stormcloud) and her grandson arrive, the genteel façade cracks. A batch of forest-foraged mushrooms lands Valérie in the hospital with suspected poisoning—and suddenly we’re in thriller territory. Or maybe a domestic psychodrama. Or maybe just a passive-aggressive episode of Great French Bake-Off: Toxic Edition. It’s hard to say, because Ozon, ever the clever aesthete, never quite commits to genre—or emotional consequence.

Instead, he gives us suggestion. Was it an accident? Is Michelle senile, or just tired of being treated like a walking casserole dish? Is it madness, menopause, or maternal revenge? Ozon is too polite to say—and that’s where the film flatlines. What could have been a blistering portrait of aging womanhood and intergenerational grief gets lost in pretty hedgerows and elliptical dialogue. Michelle doesn’t unravel; she simply fades, quietly scolded by her daughter, pitied by the villagers, and smothered by a narrative that ultimately cages her in ambiguity.

There’s a subplot involving Marie-Claude’s son Vincent (Pierre Lottin), freshly released from prison and creeping around like a low-budget Bresson villain. But like most of the male presences in the film, he functions mainly as a ghost from the past—an echo of violence that gets acknowledged, then promptly excused. The film hints at dark secrets but treats them like inconvenient weeds: better left unpulled.

It’s all very Ozon—measured, elliptical, wry. But in this case, that restraint feels like a missed opportunity. Where is the fury? The clarity? The righteous rage of women who gave their lives to family and community, only to be told they’re irrelevant now? Michelle’s crime, real or imagined, should be a roar. Instead, it’s a whisper.

VERDICT:
When Fall Is Coming is a tastefully rendered portrait of repression with just enough poison to intrigue, but not enough to intoxicate. It nods at the complexities of aging, motherhood, and mental health, but never dares to strip them bare. In a better world, Michelle would’ve burned that village down and served mushrooms at the wake.

2.5 out of 5 Molotovs