Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.

The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.

The film’s dialogue has ample tang of real family discourse, but it often fails to rivet.

While he does, to an extent, stifle some of his more adolescent instincts in comparison to earlier films (e.g. Laurence Anyways and Mommy), Dolan generally appears to have mistaken maturity for joylessness.

[Dolan's] crafted the semblance of a substantial movie that never quite gets where it was supposed to go.