Répertoire des villes disparues [Ghost Town Anthology] (2019)

(On TV, August 2022) There are many intriguing and even effective elements to the French-Canadian low-budget supernatural rural drama Répertoire des villes disparues. It begins with a surprisingly jolting static one-shot in which a car swerves from a country road to abruptly crash into an obstacle, killing the driver. The plot of the film follows the atmosphere and consequence of that event: In a very small rural-Quebec town of barely two hundred people, any death hits people hard, and it’s not an eager-faced young “foreign” psychologist from Montréal who’s going to help anyone. As the film goes on, the portrait of grief and aimlessness in a small town gives way to a far more intriguing and far less-developed supernatural plot. The dead are now visible, hovering a few feet aboveground like giant harmless scarecrows and scaring the salt-of-the-earth characters. This, as is revealed in one of the film’s more dumbfounding developments, is now a provincial phenomenon worthy of study. But if you’re expecting this to lead to something interesting—oops, too bad because the film is now out of time and it’s not as if writer-director Denis Côté (working from a novel by Laurence Olivier) seems interested is following his concept to its resolution. In the tradition of many filmmakers averse to delving too deeply into genre material, Côté seems more at ease in the eerie, the uncanny. That does make Répertoire des villes disparues an effective film, but in a limited—even stunted—way. Even at its slow deliberate pace, it does not seem to fully engage with its ideas, or even develop them effectively. (One would think that the psychologist-from-Montréal would have been a better character to develop the story… but no.)  It’s far more effective in conflating the grief for a young man’s death into a more generalized malaise (helped along by overcast winter skies) about the ongoing but foregone death of the community. I’m sure there’s a much better movie to be made from all of these elements… but this is only half a success even if you’re being generous.