French-Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand has made a career out of exploring humanity’s darker side with a bitter comic tone. Never one to shy away from the foibles and fallibilities of human beings, Arcand once again takes no prisoners with his world view as presented in Days of Darkness (L’âge des ténèbres). Darkness is being described as the third chapter in the trilogy started with The Decline of the American Empire (Le déclin de l’empire américain) and followed through with the Oscar-winning The Barbarian Invasions (Les invasions barbares), even though none of the characters from those films has a prominent role. Like a lot of threes, Darkness is the weakest but it still manages to be as compelling and unforgiving as the others.

The film follows downtrodden Quebec civil servant Jean-Marc Leblanc (Marc Labrèche), who finds his work and home life so unfulfilling that he must constantly escape into a fantasy life that is both elaborate and hyper-sexualized. In his fantasies, Jean-Marc is the object of pure animal sexual affection for four different women, including a famous actress (Diane Kruger) and the demure boss he kind of despises (Caroline Néron). When his super-ambitious wife (Sylvie Léonard) appears to leave him for another man in Toronto, Jean-Marc has to start dealing with his reality and his constant detachment from it. But how do you cope when you realize that living in reality can be as artificial as any fantasy life you’ve constructed for yourself? And what happens when even that fantasy becomes unsatisfying?

Like many of Arcand’s films, the preoccupation is not so much on plot development as it is on characters and their shifting internal identities. What’s problematic for Darkness,I think, is that Arcand is trying too hard to find punctuation and resolution to Jean-Marc’s predicament. The ending of the film kind of drags as if it’s trying to find some kind of happiness for the character, rather than the more obvious acceptance that perhaps there is no happiness to be found for him. Instead of ambiguity, we get an attempt at ambiguity as we’re left with the image of Jean-Marc silently peeling an apple at home in the island abode he now lives after leaving his wife and children. Labrèche is great though in portraying the deepening despair of Jean-Marc and draws you into the levity of the fantasy sequences as his character’s only escape.

The tone is also kind of uneven. Presumably the plot takes place in some kind of near future where pandemic is a constant worry and the quantifiable effects of global warming are now being felt in coastal areas. Not that the normal routine feels unaffected other than the even colder bureaucracy that Jean-Marc works for and the fact that surgical masks are common accessories. The growing frigidness and sterility of the world is a persistent theme in Darkness, but what is Arcand trying to say about it? Suburbia is fertile ground for parody, but I don’t think the film is saying anything about it other than, “It sucks.” I also don’t think the film addresses the fact that no matter how despondent that Jean-Marc is about feeling ignored, he’s just as much a zombie in life as his family.

But these are the questions that Days of Darkness provokes. It’s a thinking piece for sure and you’re certainly not going to leave the theatre feeling empty or unengaged. Standing in the shadow of Decline and Barbarians though it feels that Arcand doesn’t have anything else terribly potent to say about our society and even repeats himself a little in the process. Still, it’s a solid film with some interesting performances that recalls a level of social criticism that you don’t often get in mainstream films.