The Torrent

The Torrent is a Canadian drama film, directed by Simon Lavoie and released in 2012. An adaptation of Anne Hébert's novella Le Torrent, the film centres on the life of François, a man who was raised by his devoutly religious and abusive mother Claudine. Left deaf when his refusal to obey her demand that he enter the seminary to become a Catholic priest led Claudine to hit him on the head, he has continued to live in rural isolation, and struggles to establish human connection when he purchases Amica, a woman being sold into slavery who is eerily similar to his mother in her youth.