Twelve-year-old Simone feels painfully disconnected from the world after witnessing the brutal death of her mother. Simone, a solitary multimedia artist in her twenties, is struggling to control her crushing panic attacks and keep her day job in an underground parking lot. And Simone, a sixty-year-old physicist, is giving a conference on the nature of time. The three Simones' lives are intertwined in a labyrinthine meta-world where timeframes overlap, characters multiply, and storylines repeat and expand. But, for all its shuttling forward and back through time, ENDORPHINE remains grounded in the Simones' inner lives — it's an artistic examination of scientific phenomena that also poignantly explores how people deal with trauma.
Cinematography
Turpin's clinical framing turns parking garages into liminal nightmares
Acting
Mackay's panic attack scenes are physically exhausting to watch
Editing
Temporal collisions that reward patient attention
Director
André Turpin
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Director André Turpin is primarily known as Denis Villeneuve's cinematographer on Incendies and several other films — this is his rare directorial outing.
The film's Quebecois funding and theatrical minimalism represent a distinct wave of French-Canadian cinema that rejects Hollywood trauma narratives for something more abstract and chilly.
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