The Kindness That Cuts Both Ways

Read Time:5 Minute, 33 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
When Fall is Coming (Quand vient l'automne)
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Genre: Drama, Thriller, Family
Year Released: 2024, Blu-ray 2025
Runtime: 1h 42m
Director(s): François Ozon
Writer(s): François Ozon, with Philippe Piazzo
Cast: Hélène Vincent, Josiane Balasko, Ludivine Sagnier, Pierre Lottin, Garlan Erlos, Sophie Guillemin, Malik Zidi, Paul Beaurepaire
Where to Watch: available now, order your copy here: www.musicboxfilms.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: WHEN FALL IS COMING makes it clear that home life can be a costume. François Ozon sets the table with warmth and ritual—country air, routine, a grandmother fussing over lunch—then lets a single, pointed decision unshackle everything we know. The incident isn’t loud; it doesn’t have to be. In this house, gestures carry more weight than speeches. That’s the film’s core: a story of love and control disguised as everyday caretaking, with a grandmother who tells herself she’s fixing what years of hurt have broken.

Hélène Vincent’s Michelle holds the film with precision, keeping the morality shifting from scene to scene. She’s gentle with her grandson, selfish with the truth, and acutely sensitive to status—how she’s seen in her village, by her priest, by a daughter who seems to come home only to keep score. It’s a part that asks for contradictory impulses and lets the actor reveal them one at a time: the way a voice softens when Lucas enters the room, the way a jaw sets when Valérie raises an eyebrow. Vincent never telegraphs guilt or innocence; she plays the part of someone who needs to believe she’s right.

Around her, Ozon builds a small world that complicates every choice. Josiane Balasko’s Marie-Claude is the friend who understands the rules and knows when to break them; her scenes with Michelle carry a warmth and the kind of banter that only comes from decades of shared history. Pierre Lottin’s Vincent, newly released from prison, brings volatility and tenderness in the same breath. He isn’t a plot device—he’s a mirror for Michelle, a reminder that “help” can look like rescue or like leverage depending on who’s holding the rope. Ludivine Sagnier’s Valérie, the daughter, arrives with all the attention. Her hostility is a shield and a warning: she’s tired of being managed by someone who insists she’s only loving her.

Ozon and co-writer Philippe Piazzo don’t treat these relationships as puzzles to be solved; they’re systems that adapt under pressure. The script favors action and inference over confession. A lunch goes poorly, and everyone chooses a different “lesson” to take away from it; a favor is offered, accepted, and quickly weaponized. Police and parish are present but peripheral. What matters is the choreography of obligation—how a grandmother can turn a school break into a campaign, how a daughter can turn a hospital room into a courtroom, how a friend’s grief opens a door that maybe should have stayed locked.

Ozon sprinkles dark humor with a light hand: a stinging aside here, an awkward interaction there. The jokes never soften the stakes; they slice away pretense. This is an adult story in the best sense—interested in the decisions people make after their twenties, in reputations that can’t be rebooted, in the compromises that become personality. When the thriller elements tighten—phone calls, alibis, the small rituals of covering tracks—the film retains its domestic scale.

Performances across the ensemble are dialed in. Vincent helps carry the film without dominating it, allowing Balasko to steal scenes with a warmth that can turn on a dime, and Lottin to complicate the moral configuration. Sagnier’s Valérie occasionally edges toward a single note in early scenes. Still, as the story unfolds, her brittleness appears as the natural consequence of living under a parent’s carefully curated version of the past. Even the smaller roles feel intentionally placed: a priest who hears more than he says, a doctor who delivers news like it’s paperwork but knows exactly how it will land.

What the film does particularly well is frame care as a contested space. Michelle’s actions are driven by love, but love that insists on its own form becomes coercion. The script has the discipline to let that ambiguity stand. Viewers will argue in good faith about intent, accident, and how much leeway to grant a person who believes the ends justify the means. That’s the point. Ozon isn’t setting traps for his audience; he’s asking whether restoring a family is possible without rewriting the uncomfortable parts of the record.

WHEN FALL IS COMING earns its place, it’s smaller than Ozon’s showier titles and stronger for it—a seasoned tale about people who believe love permits them, and the thin line between caretaking and control. The performances are genuine, the writing is agile, and the moral afterglow is satisfyingly thorny. It’s a sharp, unsettling pleasure—the kind that invites conversation long after the credits and makes you think twice about what, exactly, constitutes kindness.

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[photo courtesy of MUSIC BOX FILMS]

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