When Fall is Coming review: mushrooms and murder combine again – or do they?

Long before the macabre case of Erin Patterson and the murderous Beef Wellington laced with death caps gripped the attentions of Australian and international true-crime addicts, mushrooms brought chaos to cinema.  

They pop up from deep within the mycelial network to raise a plump question mark over When Fall is Coming (Quand vient l’Automne), the latest mischievous morsel from prolific French filmmaker François Ozon.

Before that, their poisonous plot potential enjoyed a purple patch on the big screen between 2016 and 2017. Vicky Krieps’ Alma gained the upper hand over her supercilious lover, Reynolds (Daniel Day-Lewis), with not one, but two non-fatal doses in Paul Thomas Anderson’s deliciously wicked Phantom Thread.

Nicole Kidman and co offed Colin Farrell’s angry unionist soldier in Sophia Coppola’s adaptation of author Thomas P. Cullinan’s erotic gothic thriller The Beguiled (first adapted by Don Siegel in 1971). And Florence Pugh’s Katherine got rid of an abusive husband the same way in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth.

Further back still, mushrooms are briefly hinted at as a sneakily ideal murder weapon in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 classic, Shadow of a Doubt, and tease us in Pedro Almodóvar’s steamy 1986 shocker, Matador.

Watch the When Fall is Coming trailer.

More recently, they enter, stage left, after the murderous fact in Misericordia, the latest erotically dark comedy from Stranger by the Lake director Alain Guiraudie, a fellow queer French cinematic troublemaker, alongside Ozon.

When Fall is Coming: fungal attraction

Set in the pleasingly autumnal shade of a leafy Burgundy village, When Fall is Coming is here to remind us that Ozon, once dubbed the enfant terrible of French cinema, is a real fungi who gleefully messes with genre and our moral compass.

Centred on a magnificently engaging turn by Hélène Vincent, she plays abundantly contented retiree, Michelle. Early scenes of her foraging for mushroooms with best friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko, who appears with Vincent in Ozon’s take-down of child abuse within the Catholic church, By the Grace of God) are as pleasingly ASMR-inducing as Michelle tending to her veggie patch, brushing her hair, cooking up a feast and later falling asleep with a good book.

But while the film maintains this comforting vibe throughout, things are about to take a hectic turn.

Michelle’s peace is rudely disturbed by the arrival, from Paris, of her constantly sniping daughter, Valérie. As played by beloved Ozon regular Ludivine Sagnier, she’s a monumental pain in the arse who can barely be bothered to raise her eyes from her phone during lunch. You get the sense that her claim she’s in withdrawal after quitting ciggies is just the latest in a long line of flimsy excuses with which to harangue her poor mother.

What makes Valérie’s brittle badgering bearable is the delight Michelle clearly feels in the company of her beautiful, doe-eyed grandson, Lucas (newcomer Garlan Erlos). Escaping on a walk together, sans Valérie, his grandmother even allows him some sneaky tablet time while underlining that she adores nature and could never be bored living here.

The problem is, when they get back, Valérie is unconscious and being loaded into an ambulance. At the hospital, early results reveal that she has been inadvertently (‽) poisoned by the garlic mushrooms Michelle served up for lunch. A dish that neither she nor Lucas (who hates them) ate. Later, a furious Valérie assumes her mother did it deliberately, storming back to Paris and forbidding Michelle from ever seeing Lucas again.

When Fall is Coming: unoriginal sin

Not not central to When Fall is Coming, the swirling ambiguity around Michelle’s guilt enriches every inch of the film. But it’s also a red herring of sorts, despite the niggling suspicions of Sophie Guillemin’s detective.

No one is exactly who they seem in Ozon’s discombobulatingly wholesome affair that digs into complicated history. That Michelle lived a life less ordinary before her blissful country retreat is hinted at in the opening scene, as she listens to the local priest’s sermon about Mary Magdalene.

While it is likely apocryphal that Magdalene was a sex worker, a defamatory fiction cruelly designed by a patriarchal church to diminish her centrality to Jesus’ teachings, Ozon adopts this common understanding to layer thorny backstory into why Valérie’s so antagonistic towards her mother. A judgmental nature that reflects poorly on the younger woman.

As Michelle slumps into depression, deprived of Lucas, she ‘adopts’ Marie-Claude’s recently released from prison son, Vincent (Pierre Lottin). Aiding his attempt to stay on the straight and narrow, this includes helping fund his plans for a wine bar in the village. A charitable act that riles her best friend, who suspects Vincent’s up to no good again, a suspicion hinted at by shifty scenes set in a playground after dark.

And so overlapping themes of guilt and redemption, love and disconnection coalesce. But just as we think we have a handle on what Ozon’s up to, he flips the table again with another moral quandary, wrongfooting us and bringing Guillemin’s kindly but increasingly suss cop back for more questioning.

When Fall is Coming: rebel heart

And questions you will have, in the very best way, watching this autumnal treat lusciously lensed by cinematographer Jérôme Alméras and silkily scored by sibling composers Evgueni and Sascha Galperine.

Ozon, co-writing with Philippe Piazzo, who worked alongside him on such wildly diverging films as Frantz, Double Lovers, Everything Went Fine and The Crime is Mine, has once more knitted an intriguing drama that’s greater than the sum of its already handsome parts (though an overt supernatural nod slightly oversteps).

When Fall is Coming gleams where shadows should linger, all the while shining a light on our complicit desires.

That the greater good is sometimes bad is both true and a gloriously daring cinematic provocation. One made all the more muscular for its focus on matriarchal strength and the film’s rebelliously gentle heart.

With not a weak link in the ensemble, including a short but sweet cameo from The Crime is Mine actor Paul Beaurepaire as an older Lucas and Erlos’ wise beyond his years conveying of his younger self’s unspoken choices, this mushroom-loaded murder (‽) mystery is a feast for the soul.

When Fall is Coming is in Australian cinemas from 31 July 2025.

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