Directed by Xavier Dolan. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

In Tom at the Farm, Xavier Dolan’s narratively impenetrable fourth feature, the way André Turpin’s camera fixes on Dolan’s handsome, sad-eyed face—usually framed by an insouciant, dyed-blond mop—explains more about the movie’s raison d’être than does anything in its paragraph-worthy plot.

Maker of the impressive I Killed My Mother (followed by the disappointing Heartbeats and the even messier Laurence Anyways), the 24-year-old filmmaker plays the title character, driven into the country outside of Montreal (La Prairie and beyond) to attend the funeral of his recent and unexplainedly dead lover Guy, who left his lonely, white-haired mother (superb veteran Lise Roy) back on a remote dairy farm.

Tom doesn’t know that Guy had an older brother, feared locally for his unpredictably violent temper. He soon encounters the big, brooding Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who sets in to beating, bribing, and otherwise manipulating Tom into adding much-needed life to the darkly repressed family homestead. Things begin heading into a Matthew Shepard–type situation, egged on by Gabriel Yared’s overwrought orchestral score, which is clearly meant to evoke Bernard Herrmann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock. But there’s another Hitch or two when Tom goes all Stockholm syndrome on the psycho Francis, explaining away those cuts and bruises like a long-abused wife.

The film’s thin script, all too apparently adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard’s stage play, relates deeply ingrained misogyny to homophobia.

And there’s another allegory—underlined by the “USA” jacket Francis wears in the film’s violent and dragged-out conclusion—regarding the bully’s threatening relationship with his family and neighbours. (Francis rarely grabs anything he couldn’t have had by simply asking nicely.)

The actors do their best to inhabit sketchily drawn roles, and there are nifty formal tricks on-screen, but it’s not enough to convince anyone that human beings would actually behave in the artificially erratic ways depicted here.

In the end, it’s just too hard to buy whatever the hell this Farm is selling.