The film opens with an upset Tom (Xavier Dolan) driving somewhere.  He appears to be getting further and further from civilzation, and expresses what seems to be anger, sadness and possibly loneliness as he gets further into the country, to a more remote area where his crazy hair, skinny jeans and leather jacket seem woefully out of place.  When he finally arrives at his destination – a farm pretty much in the middle of nowhere – no one is there to greet him, and he can’t get any service on his cell phone.  Unsure what to do at first, Tom manages to locate a key, lets himself in, has a look around, and then settles into the kitchen to wait.

A woman, Agathe (Lise Roy), stands in the doorway watching him sleep for a moment before waking him to ask who he is.  We find out that Tom is, in fact, the good friend of Agathe’s recently-deceased son, Guillaume, and that Tom has arrived to speak at the funeral.  Agathe welcomes Tom into her home with open arms, even insisting that Tom sleep in Guillaume’s bed while he is there.

From there, things get tense and weird pretty quickly – more so than they already have been.  See, Tom’s not just Guillaume’s friend – they were lovers.  Guillaume’s brother, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), also lives in the house with Agathe, and the boys apparently still share a bedroom, even though they are now both grown men.  A creepy, sparse little room, with two single beds and a nightstand.  Agathe doesn’t know that her son was gay, and Francis is determined to keep it that way, by any means necessary.  He makes his intentions abundantly clear to Tom on the first night, and just gets increasingly threatening and violent from there.  In addition, he’s made up a girlfriend (Evelyne Brochu) for Guillaume, using the name Sarah and a photograph he’d coerced his brother into sending him to trick their mother into believing both of her sons were straight.  The relationship that then builds between Francis and Tom is like a broken roller-coaster ride, and serves to raise the tension level to crazy heights throughout the film, and it becomes very difficult to tell who among them is the more insane, after awhile.

Dolan wears many hats with Tom At The Farm, from director to star to co-writing the screenplay with Michel Marc Bouchard.  Oh, and he edited it, as well.  But he wears each hat very well, and manages to pull the entire film together into a very stressful 95 minute experience.  More is said between the lines than is vocalized, and the camera angles cut between following Tom around the farm at his shoulder when he first arrives, to tight close-ups on a character’s facial expressions in pivotal moments – all of which successfully draws the viewer into the film as a whole.  By the end, we almost come out of the film understanding Tom less than we did going in, and not in a bad way.  The moody atmosphere of this one will stay with you long after the final frame has rolled.