Peak Everything is described as a climate change romcom with an express goal to leave the audience anxious about the state of the world. But honestly, by the end, I would have welcomed a swift cataclysm if it mean an end to this ponderous and navel-gazing dramedy.

Patrick Hivon plays Adam, a sad but kind man who can't seem to get his affairs in order. He owns a dog sitting business, though how any of it makes money is a mystery. His assistant lusts after him casually and his only friends are his father and a childhood pal who worries about Adam's constant sorrow.

One day, Adam calls the helpline for his bright lamp, designed to improve his moods if he sits before it a half hour per day. On the other end, Tina (Piper Perabo) answers, and the two hit it off simply because the plot requires them to. It's certainly not due to chemistry or crackling dialog, as both remain absent for the entire film.

Around them, the world is rapidly shifting due to unspecified weather events. Freak thunderstorms, sudden snow, and earthquakes happen on the regular. Though they might also be entirely in Adam's head. It's all very unclear and very French.

After an earthquake cuts off their phone call, Adam rushes across country to find Tina and offers her a safe place to stay for a few days. She's married, but that doesn't stop either of them. Instead, they bond over their mutual doomerism without a particular outlet for their anxieties. Almost as if they're waiting for the world to end as an excuse to consummate their feelings for one another.

Not much else happens, and what does happen is profoundly dull. Imagine if Noah Baumbach tried to make a Roland Emmerich movie, and you'd get something like this. It's the kind of snooty and smug comedy that at best gets a light guffaw, but rarely finds a tone that isn't on the wrong side of distasteful. Early on, there's a gag about Adam's uncertainty if Tina is real or not. "Are you an AI or something?" he politely asks after their initial flirting. It's not because she's too good to be true, but because nobody speaks like the dialog here requires them to.

The jokes mainly center around the fact that Adam is depressed and that his depression is over such existential magnitude it encompasses the world entire. But instead of treating this with empathy, writer/director Anne Émond settles for repeated gags of him getting bullied and eventually snapping.

On top of that, the central relationship isn't engaging or romantic. It isn't even interesting enough to warrant empathy over Adam and Tina's shared sense of despair, because it can't commit to a tone. At times, it's sad, at others, it's horny, only to swerve into a deeply uncomfortable territory involving domestic drama and self-harm.

Peak Everything takes big swings with its ideas, and I want to love it more for that. I'm thrilled any director wants to depict the uncertainty, fear, and pain of a collapsing civilization from a grounded level. But Émond's film keeps tripping over itself, introducing new bits to satirize and strange thematic cul-de-sacs that frustrate more than they delight.

By the end, it's supposed to play like a cathartic release, something like the long game in Punch Drunk Love. But Émond hasn't given us enough to warrant these feelings, so instead the release means very little. Combined with a thoroughly off-putting bit of surrealism and French voice-over, and it's enough to want it all to end, as long as it means we don't have to keep on watching.