This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
When Xavier Dolan stated that he was retiring from filmmaking because “art is meaningless” and “the world is burning,” I gave him around a year to backtrack and announce a new project.
It’s around a year now since Dolan’s comments went viral, and guess what? He’s making a new film. Dolan is now telling a French outlet that heading the jury of this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes reinvigorated him (via IONCINEMA).
Dolan has dusted off a project he wrote before the pandemic, and is now putting the finishing touches on what will be his ninth feature film. He’s making a horror film. Dolan says the upcoming film “explores themes of fear, failure, and rejection.” He’s 20 pages away from finalizing the screenplay and is “pleased with its development.”
The film is set in 1880s France and will be shot in that country. He is aiming for a fall 2025 shoot, which means a Cannes 2026 premiere would be the best possible outcome for his return to the Croissette.
One can call Dolan’s 2010s rise in the film world a “sensation,” having directed seven films in his twenties, for which he received multiple awards, including winning the Jury Prize at Cannes for 2014’s “Mommy” — still his best film.
Dolan has become this polarizing figure among cinephiles. After surprising the film world, in his mid-20s, with well-received fare such as “Laurence Anyways,” “Mommy,” and "Tom at the Farm,” his last three (“Matthias & Maxime,” “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan,” and “It’s Only the End of the World”) were not as critically acclaimed.