Catherine Brisson on Nervures, Raymond St-Jean's Quebec horror film
catherine brisson reports that Raymond St-Jean and Martin Girard have made Nervures, a rural fantasy-horror film set in a family house and rooted in Quebec reality. The film follows Isabelle, who returns to her natal village for a weekend with her partner and learns her father has been dead for three days.
St-Jean said he wanted the film’s transformations to lead to beauty rather than only body horror. The story also folds in village depopulation, climate upheaval and medical aid in dying through a fantastical lens.
St-Jean and Girard
St-Jean and Girard wrote Nervures as an intimate drama in a rural family house, using the setting to show the characters’ transformations. The director said the film explores social themes through a fantasized, magical and ironic approach, so audiences can make their own links after seeing it.
He cited Les yeux sans visage by Georges Franju and “La goutte d’eau” from Les Trois visages de la peur by Mario Bava among the works that shaped the film. He also said, “Il y a du conte dans le film, parce que j’ai toujours aimé le conte, le merveilleux.”
Romane Denis as Isabelle
Romane Denis plays Isabelle, with Marie-Thérèse Fortin as her mother, Richard Fréchette as her father, Alexandre Castonguay as her uncle, Sylvain Marcel as the village doctor and Anana Rydvald as the doctor’s botanist wife. Denis had previously appeared in Slaxx, and St-Jean said the role was originally written for a woman in her thirties before he made Isabelle younger after seeing Denis audition with Fortin.
He called Denis “mon petit miracle.” Denis said the project appealed to her because it sought to push genre limits and show that Quebec cinema can renew horror without leaning only on American models.
Quebec genre cinema
Nervures follows the success of Crépuscule pour un tueur, placing St-Jean and Girard back in a genre space that has already reached Quebec audiences through films such as Slaxx and Les affamés. The new film adds a family-centered rural story to that line, with Isabelle confronting illness, old age and death early in the plot.
St-Jean said he made a telefilm about Lovecraft in 1998, titled Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and he described himself as a big fan of Lovecraft. Nervures carries that taste for unease into a Quebec setting, where the mother, uncle and village doctor become the figures Isabelle watches most closely.
