By John Corrado

The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto.

The latest collaboration between director Sean Garrity and star Jonas Chernick, The Burning Season is a simmering romantic drama with a dark secret at its centre that starts at the end and works its way back to the beginning. The film opens with Alena (Sara Canning) and her husband Tom (Joe Pingue) going to the wedding of JB (Chernick) and Poppy (Tanisha Thammavongsa), with the night taking a turn when Alena and JB’s long-running affair is revealed.

From here, the film unfolds in backwards chronological order through seven chapters and a prologue, showing how their relationship evolved over various summer vacations when Alena and Tom would come to stay at the lakeside property that JB runs. This all builds to an inciting incident that is hinted at in the opening shot, with little clues sprinkled throughout.

Garriety and Chernick (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Diana Frances) are perhaps best known for their more comedic work like My Awkward Sexual Adventure and most recently The End of Sex, making The Burning Season one of their darker, more serious collaborations. The story does have a very episodic feel to it, but it’s an intriguing narrative structure that allows the film to explore this affair in an unconventional way through a series of snapshots shown in reverse.

Each chapter almost feels like its own short film, with each one building upon the last to go back and reveal more details as it goes along. Canning and Chernick – delivering a different, more dramatic variation on the types of characters he usually plays – make for engaging, well-rounded leads, with necessary chemistry between them.

Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)

The Burning Season screens as the closing night film of the Canadian Film Fest on Saturday, March 23rd at 7:30pm at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto. Tickets and more information can be found right here.