by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $15.60
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Cast:
Marie Eve Loyez, Geneviève Ackerman, Frédérik Dufour, Xavier Neszvecsko
Intro:
… cinema that refuses to play by the rules.
Lucie is a French woman living in Canada, a PhD student without a work permit, who suffers from insomnia and struggles to finish her dissertation. Her life is complicated by an affair with Grégoire, her married academic supervisor, who calls her late at night and invites her over as if neither his family nor any other obligations existed. At the same time, Lucie is being stalked by her ex-boyfriend Eugène, an eccentric unemployed actor with whom she is forced to share an apartment. One night, she gets on her motorbike and rides to Grégoire’s place, only to find him asleep in his wife’s arms. After leaving a note in his cigarette pack on the kitchen table, Lucie returns home, where she discovers that Eugène has been following her. By morning, she remembers the night’s events only in fragments. A chance encounter in the woods with Béatrice, a homeless woman to whom she recounts her nocturnal adventures, marks the beginning of an unexpected friendship.
This is how Nightmare’s Advice (Cauchemar Conseil) begins — the second feature by Canadian filmmakers Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk. Though “begins” is perhaps not quite the right word: the plot soon abandons its familiar trajectory, dissolving into chance encounters, conversations, walks and episodes that seem under no obligation to form a coherent story.
In the opening scene, Lucie dances knee-deep in mud with Igor (Renaud Després-Larose), a shaman who lives in the woods on the outskirts of the city. From then on, the film does not so much explain what is happening as invite us to accept its rules — or, more precisely, to abandon the expectation that any rules exist at all.
If one were to describe this cinematic experiment in a single sentence, it might go something like this: Rohmer meets Rivette, and the two go together to visit Denis Côté and Graham Swon. From Rohmer comes the lightness of the dialogue and the almost summery ease of a relationship story in which people endlessly discuss themselves, others and their own desires. From Rivette comes the theatricality, the intellectual play and the eccentric characters who seem to have wandered out of some kind of performance. Lucie is writing a dissertation about play, and this subject gradually becomes more than a biographical detail: it offers a key to the film’s very structure. Where does life end and performance begin? Can you turn your own failure into a game if you have no control over its rules? And who gets to decide what counts as normal behaviour?
Eugène, Béatrice and Igor exist somewhere on the boundary between eccentricity and freedom. They can be irritating and disorienting, seeming at times like characters from someone else’s dream, yet their presence is precisely what disrupts the familiar logic of Lucie’s life. Against the backdrop of academic obligations, a dubious affair and the threat of ending up on the street, these people offer her not so much a solution to her problems as an alternative way of existing. Their world is not necessarily better than the real one, but it leaves room for chance and unpredictability.
From Denis Côté, the film inherits its unhurried pace and its attention to people on the margins of the social order. Here, however, the observation of marginal characters gradually turns into something stranger: the narrative begins to wander alongside its protagonists, as if it no longer knows where it is going. Graham Swon — particularly The World is Full of Secrets — comes to mind in the film’s sense of an unstable boundary between everyday life and fantasy. Reality does not so much give way to the supernatural as quietly loses its credibility. The most extraordinary event can be taken for granted, while an ordinary conversation may suddenly acquire an air of mystery.
The soundscape, created by Rousiouk, plays a particularly important role. Music and sound do not simply accompany the action; they exist alongside it, creating an additional layer of reality. The sound sometimes seems entirely at odds with what is happening on screen. Where one might expect a dramatic accent, the film offers an almost weightless musical phrase; where a scene might otherwise become comic, the sound lends it an uncanny solemnity. This disconnect recalls the cinema of Alexander Koberidze, in which the world often feels at once tangible and enchanted, and the familiar relationship between image, sound and the viewer’s emotional response becomes optional.
In Nightmare’s Advice (Cauchemar Conseil), this freedom comes at a price. The film runs for almost two and a half hours, and not all its detours feel justified. Some scenes give the impression that the filmmakers simply do not want to part with their characters and decide to spend a little more time with them, even when the story has nothing new to offer.
Experimentation gradually becomes an end in itself, and viewers may lose interest before the film has exhausted its ideas. Yet this unevenness is also part of its appeal: the film seems to reject the idea of a well-organised work, preferring to exist in a state of perpetual creative disorder.
Among the films of 2026, Nightmare’s Advice (Cauchemar Conseil) stands out as one of the strangest experiences: a work that can seem absurd at one moment, unexpectedly charming the next, and almost never allows the viewer to feel secure in their usual expectations. Perhaps this is where its central experiment lies: not in telling a story about freedom, but in making the viewer spend two and a half hours experiencing cinema that refuses to play by the rules.
