Xavier Dolan’s miniseries The Night Logan Woke Up sees him returning to familiar themes with a visually stylish, well-performed melodrama.
Director: Xavier Dolan
Number of episodes: 5
U.S. Release: October 18, 2023 on Netflix
U.K. Release: November 1, 2024 on Studiocanal Presents
“Truth is like the sun. It casts light on everything, but refuses to be seen,” – Victor Hugo.
Hugo may have been on to something here, but he ignores one important thing – that lies are the clouds that keep the truth hidden, and the shadows they cast can be more destructive than the truth itself.
Adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard’s play of the same name, The Night Logan Woke Up (La Nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est Réveillé) follows the Larouche family: dying matriarch Madeleine (Anne Dorval, a frequent Dolan collaborator), temperamental Julien (Patrick Hivon), his wife Chantal (Magalie Lapine-Blondeau), divorcee Denis (Eric Bruneau), recovering addict Elliot (Xavier Dolan) and pariah Mireille (Julie Le Breton). Calling the Larouches dysfunctional would be a bit of an understatement, as their feelings towards one another range from pity to ambivalence to outright hatred.
As Mireille returns home for the first time in 25 years to grant her mother’s final wish to embalm her, Dolan cuts back and forth between 2019 and 1991 to show the root of the family’s discord and how it all ties back to a specific event involving Julien’s former best friend Logan Goodyear (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie). Only a select few people know the truth of what happened that night, but everyone knows the lie and how it destroyed the Larouche family.
To say anything more would spoil the mystery, although the ultimate twist isn’t hard to crack (I clocked it within the first fifteen minutes of episode one). But even though the story’s twists and turns are easy to track, the road to discovering them is often compelling, especially since the specifics of that fateful event from 1991 don’t matter nearly as much as the wreckage it caused.
The Night Logan Woke Up is Canadian auteur Dolan’s first foray into television, and he uses its extended runtime to delve deeply into the toxic family dynamics that he has spent much of his career focusing on, from his first feature I Killed My Mother to his poorly-received English-language debut The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.
You can feel Dolan enjoying the breathing room that the miniseries format provides, allowing him to indulge in several elegantly edited montages accompanied by pop music and explosive dialogue scenes. But despite the occasional visual flourish, Dolan mostly restrains himself in terms of style, utilizing Andrée Turpin’s grainy cinematography to craft gorgeous wides and close-ups so intimate they make you feel as if you could get under the character’s skin and find the secrets lurking underneath.
Unfortunately, Dolan’s writing isn’t always as successful as his direction. While he has adapted Bouchard’s work into feature films before (Tom at the Farm), the expansion of a two hour stage play into five hours of television has clearly led to some growing pains. The episodes are somewhat awkwardly structured in the way that they cut between the timelines and the various members of the Larouche family, and Dolan’s propensity for eruptive familial arguments leads to the episodes feeling like they’ve reached their climactic moment only for a similar scene to pop up ten minutes later. It creates both a sense of emotional whiplash and lowers the personal stakes within these terse exchanges.
Luckily, the cast more than makes up for any shortcomings in the material. The Night Logan Woke Up has one of the finest television ensembles assembled in recent years, with every member giving a top notch performance. Patrick Hivon and Anne Dorval deservedly won Gémeaux Awards (Quebec’s equivalent of the Emmys) for their performances as Julien and Madeleine, respectively. Hivon does an excellent job of calibrating Julien’s simmering anger and self-loathing, allowing it to boil over in moments of violent intensity.
His best scenes are the ones he shares with Julie Le Breton as Mireille, whose mesmerizing performance as the Larouches’ most broken member manages to find the human underneath her clichéde storyline, (you’re telling me this female character suppresses their trauma through gratuitous alcohol and sex? Groundbreaking!)
Dolan casts himself as the recently sober Elliot, giving the character a romantic storyline with Mireille’s funeral home co-worker Stephanie (Julianne Côté) that never quite fully makes sense from a plot perspective. Eric Bruneau’s Denis is probably the most underserved by the material, but he still gets a few sweet paternal moments to play with younger brother Elliot and his two estranged daughters.
Anne Dorval has collaborated with Dolan several times since his debut feature, and here he provides her yet another juicy role that showcases her considerable talents. As would-be mayoral candidate Madeleine, Dorval masterfully displays the Larouche matriarch’s increasingly fraying nerves and inability to keep her family together, particularly in her scenes with Jasmine Lemée as the younger Mireille. It’s a shame that Dorval doesn’t get more chances to play opposite Magalie Lapine-Blondeau, whose fiery Chantal often steals scenes, especially in a showstopping karaoke moment in episode three.
While The Night Logan Woke Up builds to a predictable and somewhat unsatisfying end, Xavier Dolan makes room for enough well-crafted filmmaking and finely tuned performances to make for a worthwhile watch.
The Night Logan Woke Up was released on Tubi in Canada on November 24, 2022 and on Netflix in the U.S. on October 18, 2023. The series will be available to stream in the U.K. exclusively on Studiocanal Presents from November 1, 2024.
