When Fall is Coming arrives in Australian cinemas at a moment of peak local curiosity about mushroom poisoning. At the time Francois Ozon started making this film, probably in early 2024, he couldn’t have known that a country halfway across the world from his native France would find itself in the grip of feverish discussions about Erin Patterson, the Victoria woman accused of murdering her estranged husband’s relatives with death cap mushrooms, meaning the debate about who fed what to whom, when, and did they know, would be the topic of endless speculation. (Or, since she’d already been arrested, maybe he did know, but it seems unlikely he’d get rolling on a movie about it just a few months after her arrest.)

The eating of toxic mushrooms is key to the advertising campaign for When Fall is Coming, with a couple cheeky fungi appearing on the poster, and the line “Where mushrooms thrive, so to does menace …” tagging the press materials. In truth, the movie itself doesn’t have a lot to do with that, but you wouldn’t blame the film’s marketing team for trying to latch on to something sexy about the movie to help sell it. The quality of the filmmaking might be enough, but like many other films from its country of origin – if we want to be really reductive about French filmmaking – When Fall is Coming lacks a high concept, and possibly even a true centre.

Fortunately, this does not mean it isn’t worth seeing. It just means it’s difficult to grasp the themes it’s exploring. The French have never held themselves to such on-the-nose standards of accessibility when exporting their generally very good cinema to the world. (Or at least to America, as the word “Fall” here is a synonym for “Autumn,” as you’d note in the French title: Quand Vient L’Automne. Of course here in Australia we don’t refer to the season that way, though it does create some double entendres that speak to the film’s narrative goals.)

Overtly, the theme here is ageing. Metaphorically speaking, Michelle (Helene Vincent) is in the autumn of her life, if not the early winter. She’s living in the Burgundy countryside rather than her former Parisian home, where she is still friends with a woman from her younger years, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko). She’s expecting a visit from her estranged daughter, Valerie (played by Ludivine Sagnier, star of Ozon’s Swimming Pool), and her grandson, Lucas (Garlan Erlos), who are embroiled in a messy divorce from Lucas’ father.

The subject of Michelle’s possible senility comes to the fore when she sickens her daughter through mushrooms she and Lucas picked earlier that day, which neither she nor Lucas ate during their lunch. After a stomach pumping, Valerie is fighting fit enough to sweep Lucas up and take him back to Paris, since her mother can no longer be trusted – and could reasonably be accused, if the police wanted to, of trying to kill her own daughter. Michelle is flummoxed by the turn of events and appears to be innocent, but doubt lingers.

Valerie has good reason, or so she thinks, to disdain her mother, given that both Michelle and her friend Marie-Claude were sex workers in their younger years, when they would have been called, by the standards of the time, prostitutes – or more rudely, whores. The mushroom incident is the icing on the cake, as it were, to drive Valerie to consider permanently withholding Lucas from his grandmother.

In a bit of fortuitous timing, Marie-Claude’s son Vincent (Pierre Lotin) has just been released from prison and is looking to open a restaurant, and he may be willing to scratch Michelle’s back if she’ll scratch his. He can also be very persuasive. Whether champignons – mushrooms – will be on the menu at the restaurant is anyone’s guess.

Ageing? Poison mushrooms? The world’s oldest profession? They don’t feel like they all go together. Ozon makes it work, but not without the consequence of us sometimes questioning what he’s on about. While When Fall is Coming sometimes plays like a slice of life, it’s also a very subtle mystery, where things are left unsaid, and events occur off screen that might have natural explanations or sinister ones. If this story were made in Hollywood, it would be made with much bigger gestures, and music on the score that telegraphs how you’re supposed to feel in every moment. That Ozon makes it the way he does is certainly to his credit, but it leaves the denser among us at risk of failing to figure what he’s doing, if he’s doing anything here at all.

Ozon is a good enough filmmaker, with enough of a track record of success, that we are right to trust the way he’s telling this story, even if it is lacking in signature moments of unambiguous significance. It’s this vagueness, if we are characterising it more negatively, that has led to the whole advertising thrust to make the mushroom thing happen, when really, most everything related to that is in the film’s first 15 minutes.

Each viewer will have to decide for themselves how this vagueness lands with them. While they’re deciding, they’ll have good performances all around to buoy them, as well as sharp observations about the difficulties of relationships between parents and children. In this film’s two primary relationships between a mother and her grown child, you have one relationship that features unconditional love that has been demonstrably tested by events, and one form of love that is highly conditional, even though the person withholding that love may have no fair reason to do so.

Although it may be somewhat lacking in “a-ha!” moments, When Fall is Coming presents us with thoughtful materials that invite us to think beyond the margins of what’s happening on screen. It may be Ozon’s point that we can’t know the truth behind some of what occurs in this narrative, but also that wrong things may happen for right reasons. If we want to pose it in a way Ozon never would, and that would be misleading in terms of this narrative, but that at least ties us back to where we started: Is it wrong to poison someone with mushrooms if they deserved it? Maybe we need to ask Erin Patterson.

 

When Fall is Coming opens in cinemas today.