So, it looks pretty official to me.
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.
A year later, Dolan told a French outlet that heading the jury of the 2024 Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes reinvigorated his desire to direct. He 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.
Dolan has now posted an image of the script on his Instagram with “Autumn 2026” written on it. This thing is actually happening. No casting details for now, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this one shortly.
Speaking at the 2024 Lumière Festival, Dolan spoke about this next film, which he describes as “genre” with “comic elements.”
“It’s going to be a genre film, that’s for sure,” said Dolan. “Is it going to be a horror movie? I might have spoken too soon. There’s a lot of comic elements in the writing. There will certainly be horror moments, but it’s rather an amalgam of lots of genres.”
He added, “It will be the second chapter, the second half of a career where I slowed down to the point of nearly stopping. I know I could never sustain the same rhythm that I had before. I was younger and I was different.”
The film is set in 1880s “Parisian literary world” and will be shot in that city. I would imagine a Cannes 2027 premiere is being eyed for this film, where Dolan had become a mainstay.
One can call Dolan’s rise in the 2010s as 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 acclaimed.
