When Fantasy Mirrors the Fragility of Life

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MOVIE REVIEW
Death of a Ladies' Man
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Genre: Drama, Comedy, Fantasy
Year Released: 2020, 2025
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director(s): Matthew Bissonnette
Writer(s): Matthew Bissonnette
Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Jessica Paré, Brian Gleeson, Antoine Olivier Pilon, Karelle Tremblay, Suzanne Clément
Where to Watch: available on VOD September 26, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN does not approach its subject matter with subtlety, nor does it attempt to play things safely. Instead, the film revels in contradiction—both tragic and absurd, poetic and sardonic, tender and biting. It’s an ambitious tonal cocktail that is carried almost entirely by the strength of Gabriel Byrne, who delivers one of those rare performances that feels like both a summation of a career and a startlingly raw revelation. With Buffalo 8 handling its VOD release, the film is poised to reach a wider audience in 2025 than it did during its initial festival run, and its themes remain as relevant now as they were when Matthew Bissonnette first conceived them.

At its core, the film tells the story of Samuel O’Shea, a twice-divorced literature professor whose life has grown increasingly hollow. Drinking too much, drifting through failed relationships, and finding more meaning in escapism than reality, Samuel’s days are suddenly fractured when hallucinations begin to intrude on him. Frankenstein’s monster appears at a bar. Strangers break into Leonard Cohen songs mid-conversation. And perhaps most haunting of all, Samuel finds himself face-to-face with his long-dead father. These moments are not treated as tricks, but as surreal expressions of a man forced to confront both the collapse of his body and the fragility of his spirit.

The catalyst is a brain tumor diagnosis that leaves Samuel with limited time. Faced with mortality, he abandons his routine in Montreal and flees to his family’s cottage in Ireland. The film could have followed the familiar path of solemn self-reflection, but Bissonnette takes a riskier route: he filters Samuel’s journey through humor, musical interludes, and fantastical detours. The result is uneven but bold. When it works, it evokes the strange ways memory, regret, and imagination blur together when life is under the shadow of an ending.

Leonard Cohen’s influence is everywhere. This isn’t simply a film that uses his songs as a soundtrack—it attempts to capture the spirit of Cohen’s writing, where melancholy and eroticism, spirituality and cynicism all coexist. Hearing Cohen’s music punctuate Samuel’s odyssey elevates scenes that might otherwise risk melodrama. The lyrics serve as a dialogue with Samuel’s inner life, sometimes offering comfort and other times mocking him with a reminder of the emptiness left behind by his choices. It’s a gamble to lean so heavily on a cultural icon’s music, but here it pays off, grounding the film’s more outlandish moments in a shared cultural resonance.

The supporting cast serves to mirror and challenge Samuel’s unraveling. Jessica Paré as Charlotte introduces the possibility of late-life romance, one that is complicated by Samuel’s inability to trust that he deserves companionship fully. Brian Gleeson’s portrayal of Samuel’s father provides the most haunting counterpoint: a presence that is both mentor and ghost, urging Samuel to wrestle with his failures while embodying the echoes of regret.

Byrne commands the film with charisma. He resists the temptation to overplay Samuel’s eccentricities, instead grounding his hallucinations in reactions that make the absurd seem strangely believable. His performance lets the audience laugh at Samuel’s delusions while still feeling the weight of his illness. It’s this balance that makes the film’s tonal juggling act work better than it might have with another actor.

DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN is not without flaws. The surreal aspects, while imaginative, sometimes feel like isolated vignettes rather than cohesive storytelling. A sequence involving a hockey ballet, for instance, is memorable but disjointed, pulling attention away from the emotion. The script also occasionally lingers in self-indulgence, stretching moments of whimsy past their breaking point.

The film succeeds in its larger ambition: to capture the contradictory moments of a man’s final chapter. It does not romanticize Samuel’s flaws nor punish him for them; instead, it offers a messy, darkly funny, occasionally absurd vision of what it means to confront death with a mixture of fear, humor, and reluctant acceptance.

For audiences open to something that refuses to color inside the lines, DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN offers a rewarding experience. It’s a film that doesn’t demand to be loved by everyone, but it resonates with the strange beauty of facing the inevitable with humor, music, and a touch of absurdity.

In the end, it’s not the hallucinations or the Cohen soundtrack that linger most, but Byrne’s performance: fragile, witty, and deeply human. When the film occasionally stumbles in its ambitions, it’s still a journey worth taking—an ode to the messiness of life, the inevitability of death, and the surprising moments of connection that make both bearable.

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[photo courtesy of CELLULOID DREAMS, BUFFALO 8 PRODUCTIONS, COREY MARR PRODUCTIONS INC., DON CARMODY PRODUCTIONS, MCP PRODUCTIONS, PORT PICTURES]

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