The Burning Season: Not All Flames are Instantly Visible

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B+

Sometimes the story isn’t so much the thing. It’s the way the story is told that delivers the goods.

That’s very much the case with director Sean Garrity’s brisk and highly watchable The Burning Season, which is propelled by a straightforward concept — the widespread ravages wrought by infidelity — but is elevated by the telling, in this case, backwards from its climax.

The film opens with what will be revealed later as the prologue. Two teens, a boy and girl, are standing outside at night near a building engulfed in flames. A pact is made. Fade next to “chapter seven” and a wedding in the countryside that is about to go very, very wrong.

The film progresses sequentially in reverse, chapter by chapter, towards the opening prologue. It’s hard to say much more without spilling the beans, but let’s default to the official synopsis:

“Alena and her husband Tom spend a summer up at Luna Lake Resort. JB runs the place. He and Alena begin a dangerous and passionate secret affair. Summers only. That's the rule. Until they break it. A sexy and tragic love story.”

Add to this that JB is about to marry longtime girlfriend and business partner Poppy — also the mother of his child and friend to both Alena and Tom — and that JB and Alena are identified as the teens seen in the prologue swearing allegiance as a dangerous (deadly?) fire rages in the background. There’s complicated history to navigate.

Star Jonas Chernick, who plays JB and co-wrote the screenplay with Diana Frances, taps into a man clearly too damaged to be what he wants to be to the two most important women in his life, and his performance is wonderfully unnerving, a blaze of tics and twitches revealing neediness, arrogance, and recklessness.

He’s well-abetted by his castmates — Sara Canning, Joe Pingue, and Tanisha Thammavongsa — all committed and as three-dimensional as the gorgeously serene Algonquin Park setting surrounding them. (Other scenes take place in Whitney, ON and, briefly, Toronto).

Part of what makes The Burning Season so persuasive is its relatability. This kind of stuff happens every day to all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons.

But the impacts are disproportionally profound compared to the mundaneness of the act, especially when it happens to those bound by a secret. Talk about a concept, told here with panache.

The Burning Season. Directed by Sean Garrity. Written by Jonas Chernick and Diana Frances. Starring Sara Canning, Jonas Chernick, Joe Pingue and Tanisha Thammavongsa. In theatres May 10 including Varsity Toronto.