Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Night Logan Woke Up’ On Netflix, Where 30-Year-Old Family Secrets Are Unearthed After A Mother’s Death

In the new French Canadian series The Night Logan Woke Up, a horrible event is revisited after 30 years, with the nightmarish memories stirred up by the death of a family’s matriarch. The series streamed in Canada and Europe in 2022, with Netflix recently picking up the US streaming rights to the limited series.

THE NIGHT LOGAN WOKE UP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “VAL-DES-CHUTES, QUEBEC. AUTUMN, 2019.” We pan across a group of keepsakes, knickknacks and family photos, while an older woman walks in and puts on a robe. She sits in a chair and reads, and then notices something out her front window. Two people leave the scene outside city hall, leaving what looks like a person tied up to a flagpole. The flag on that pole, a Pride flag, is on fire.

The Gist: Denis Larouche (Éric Bruneau) wakes up at the bedside of his mother Madeline (Anne Dorval). He’s been helping to take care of her as she spends her last days in home hospice. He keeps having nightmares that she’s disappeared. Workers digging in the yard of Madeline’s house find a tin buried four feet deep; the assumption is it belongs to either Denis or one of his siblings.

When he goes to pick up his teenage niece Marie-Soleil (Rosalie Loiselle), he tells his sister-in-law Chantal (Magalie Lépine Blondeau), thought of as the family’s rock, that Maddy has a matter of days to live. But there’s some good news: His younger brother Elliot (Xavier Dolan) is being released from rehab after a 120-day stay. He needs to do more work, but he’s well enough to be released in order to see his mother before she dies. Denis shows the box to Elliot, but he doesn’t recognize it.

Denis’ brother — Chantal’s husband — Julien (Patrick Hivon) is already out of the house, studying at a local university. He sees a weird vision during a lecture and stands up, interrupting the class. The professor pulls him aside after the lecture and tells him he likes the story he wrote, involving a baseball player. At first Julien says he just made it up, but then admits he used to play baseball when he was younger. Then, while Chantal is out getting her nails done and talking about her “surprise” birthday party, Julien is sleeping with another woman. When she sees a picture of Chantal and Marie-Soleil, he tells her that “I almost have too much respect for Chantal to fuck her.”

An extremely weak Madeline asks her nurse to retrieve a box of clippings from 1991; when the nurse looks at them, it reveals that something happened then to force Madeline away from politics and public life. Later, the nurse finds Madeline on the floor, saying she wants to make a call, but also saying “not Julien” over and over.

Everyone gets word that Madeline might not make it through the night. Eventually, everyone gets there except Julien, who is stuck in the storm outside. As they wait, hoping Madeline hangs on, we flash back to 1991, when Madeline was politically active, and young Julien (Elijah Patrice-Baudelot) is friends with Logan Gaudreault (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie). According to Logan’s mother Monique (Guylaine Tremblay), who is a neighbor of the Larouches, both boys are talented enough to play in the American major leagues.

Julien eventually makes it to Madeline’s bedside, but there’s one sibling missing: Their estranged sister Mireille (Julie LeBreton). But she won’t be out of the picture for long.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While The Night Logan Woke Up is based on a play of the same name, the vibe of the series is close to what we saw with This Is Us or A Million Little Things.

Our Take: One of the reasons why we mentioned those two shows above is that The Night Logan Woke Up is going to play out its story in the “present day” (really 2019) and in 1991, and we’ll go back and forth. Things that happened back then will inform the aftermath of Madeline’s death, and the return of Mimi (Mireille’s nickname) into the Larouche fold.

We loved the way Mimi is brought back in, though we’re not sure whether this was part of the play or something cooked up by Dolan, who wrote the series and also plays Elliot: Mimi is a thanatologist that has won awards for her embalming methods, and Madeline had requested that Mimi would be the one to take care of her body after she died. But now that she’s back in the lives of her siblings, it’ll be interesting to see how things get disrupted.

The key to this show is that something happened in 1991, likely involving Logan, that sent Madeline into hiding and the family into a tailspin. Denis seems to be the only one with stability, until he returns to his apartment after Madeline’s death and we really see how messy his life is, literally and figuratively. Julien’s been broken for years, and is finally getting back on his feet and using his university studies as a means of keeping him on the straight and narrow. Elliot, who was only a baby when this horrible event happened, has had addiction issues for most of his life. And Mimi completely ran away.

So what was this event that splintered what seemed to be a model family? And will the time jumps help fill in the information or just make things more frustrating to watch? We couldn’t determine any of that from the first episode, but we’re intrigued enough to keep watching.

Sex and Skin: The scene where Julien is having sex with that near-stranger doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

Parting Shot: Julien runs into the funeral home after getting a call about his mother’s body. That’s where he sees Mimi, who tells him that she’s embalming the body.

Sleeper Star: Magalie Lépine Blondeau does a good job communicating Chantal’s concern about everyone in the family. She seems to be the only one holding everyone together, even if she’s only in the family via marriage.

Most Pilot-y Line: Monique asks about young Mimi (Jasmine Lemée) wandering into a neighbor’s house late at night, and Madeline says her excuse was she “wanted to see what the neighbor’s house looked like.” “If we have to redecorate to keep our kids in bed, we’ll die repaying the mortgage!” she says to Monique. We’re pretty sure that Mimi’s sleepwalking won’t turn out being such a lighthearted thing, and that line feels like some pretty heavy-handed foreshadowing.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Night Logan Woke Up has an interesting story at its core, and we don’t even mind that almost all of it hasn’t been revealed by the end of the first episode.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.