Inert Richard Gere drama Longing might be the worst thing to happen to Southern Ontario in ages

A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of Artificial Intelligence, the new Canadian-Israeli filmRichard Gere stars in a very Gere-esque role, playing Daniel, a wealthy New York bachelor without a care in the world.

Seeking some mixture of solace and penance, Daniel makes his way back to Rachel’s hometown of Hamilton – yes, the Hammer itself, plus scenes shot in nearby Kitchener and Cambridge – to bury his child and perhaps find a deeper purpose to his life. But what follows is a genuinely head-scratching journey that feels only accidentally absurd. In relatively quick succession, Daniel stumbles into subplots involving a drug deal gone bad, a student-teacher flirtation that mistakes malevolent behaviour for quirky naivety and one nauseating swerve into anti-abortion territory that feels ripped from an evangelical melodrama.

On the surface, it appears as if writer-director Savi Gabizon – remaking his own 2017 Israeli film – is riffing on the dark comedy of life’s gravest matters. Yet every stiff directorial decision – from the robotic dialogue to the woefully lost performances from pros like Gere and Quebec superstar Clément – suggests that the filmmaker is treating his ridiculous material with a fatal solemnity. Perhaps this all worked better in Hebrew.

Only Diane Kruger, as a high-school French teacher who once caught the lustful eye of Daniel’s son, manages to escape this car crash of a co-production unscathed. Well, until Gabizon has the actress enact an ostensibly evocative but just plain indulgent fantasy sequence in which her character, naked and enlarged to the size of Godzilla, straddles the local high school while pleasuring herself.

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