125, rue des Malaises
Released: 2026 | Runtime: 94 minutes | Genres: Comedy, Drama | Rating: 5/10 on IMDb
The premise: A man settling accounts before he leaves
Laurent Perrier has made a decision. He's leaving — and before he goes, he needs to untangle everything he's left hanging. That's it. That's the whole engine of the film.
The movie doesn't rush to explain why he's leaving, and that deliberate vagueness matters. What unfolds instead is a portrait of a man moving through his own house like someone visiting a museum of his failures. Every drawer has a story. Every silence between family members carries years of weight. The tagline — "Every family has its secrets" — isn't marketing copy. It's the thesis.
The house at 125, rue des Malaises becomes a pressure cooker. Small rooms, big grievances, nowhere to hide.
Why the comedy-drama balance actually works
Here's the thing about this film that caught me off guard: it refuses to let the comedy do the emotional heavy lifting. The jokes land — sometimes hard — but they leave a bruise.
Most films trying to straddle comedy and drama fail because they can't decide which mode to trust. They hedge. They soften the landing. 125, rue des Malaises doesn't. There's a scene midway through — Laurent at a kitchen table, someone he loves standing in the doorway not quite willing to come in — that holds the entire emotional register of the film in forty-five seconds of almost no dialogue. The comedy doesn't undercut it. The silence doesn't ruin the laughs. They just coexist.
The performances are specific in a way that matters. This isn't "family" played broad and theatrical. This is a group of people who've shared a house and a history and have mostly learned to manage each other. That's harder to pull off than it looks.
The 94-minute runtime is exactly right — any shorter and the family dynamics collapse into sketch comedy; any longer and you're watching paint dry in a Québécois kitchen (which, fine, sounds like a Bresson film, but it's not what this is).
Where to stream it right now
Movie OTT tracks this kind of film obsessively — the mid-budget, character-driven, bilingual-market productions that skip the multiplexes and find their real life on streaming. The where-to-watch widget at the top of this page shows every platform currently carrying the title in your region. Don't hunt across five tabs. The widget does the work in real time.
125, rue des Malaises is available on major OTT services. If it's moved between platforms since this article posted, Movie OTT's listings update faster than most sources catch up.
The 5/10 rating makes more sense than you'd think
That IMDb score stings until you understand how niche comedy-dramas get rated. Early viewers tend toward the extremes — people who expected something else, and people who found exactly what they needed. The curve usually shifts as the film finds its actual audience.
What's worth noting: this is a film that trusts you. It doesn't explain itself. It doesn't underline the emotional beats. It assumes you're smart enough to sit with ambiguity and patient enough to let a scene breathe. If that describes you, the rating probably doesn't matter.
Who should actually watch this
If you've ever sat across a dinner table from someone you love and felt the full weight of everything neither of you was saying — this one's for you.
You'll want to watch it in one sitting. Don't pause halfway through. The accumulation of small moments is what makes it work.
Skip it if you need your comedy broad or your drama tied up neatly. But if you're the kind of viewer who gravitates toward character-driven French-Canadian cinema — the stuff that doesn't explain itself — 125, rue des Malaises is built for you. It's quiet. Specific. Occasionally very funny. Ninety-four minutes you won't regret.
