Too ambiguous for its own good

Based on Christophe Dufossé's 2002 novel, L'Heure de la sortie [lit. trans. The Time to Exit] had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival where it screened in the new "Sconfini" section, a non-competition category for difficult-to-classify films. Which should tell you a great deal. If you can imagine the ecological themes of films such as Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter (2011) or Paul Schrader's First Reformed (2017), filtered through the milieu of Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989), but with the tonal qualities of Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960) or Fritz Kiersch's Children of the Corn (1984), then you'd be some way towards nailing director and co-writer Sébastien Marnier's second feature. Is it a satire about liberal Generation Z snowflakes overdramatically reading apocalyptic omens into trivial matters? Is it an allegory about how difficult it can be for gifted children to fit into so-called normal society? Is it a metaphor for the generation gap, and how today's children can often be alienated from even relatively young adults? Is it about desensitisation amongst a generation who have never known life without the internet or a world without post-9/11 paranoia? Is it a desperate call-to-arms, a plea on behalf of tomorrow's adults that humanity is rapidly reaching the point-of-no-return in terms of the damage we are doing to the Earth? Is it a horror movie about creepy kids doing creepy things? Is it all of these?

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