‘Try not to daydream too much,’ is the one message that Denys Arcand hopes you will take away from Days of Darkness.

‘Reality is what you get right now,’ says the director. ‘The media will want you to dream all the time. Especially in reality television, all you’ll hear is that ‘you’ve got to live your dream.’ I’m telling you, this is very dangerous.’

Before Arcand won an Academy Award for The Barbarian Invasions, he was a historian who wrote and directed Oscar-nominated The Decline of the American Empire and Jesus of Montreal.

‘What I’m telling you is that, in real life, you’ll never meet Angelina Jolie, and even if you meet her, she won’t give you the time of day,’ says Arcand.

Days of Darkness ‘puts up a mirror to our society,’ says producer Denise Robert, also Arcand’s life partner, in a separate interview. ‘Denys is simply showing it.’

He is also making viewers squirm. Days is a portrait of society that has stopped communicating, as seen through the eyes of an ordinary fellow, Jean-Marc, superbly interpreted by thespian Marc Labreche, who plays the ultimate legend in his own mind.

In reality, he’s an invisible government worker in a sexless marriage with an uncaring teenager daughter (who gives blow jobs to the neighbors’ boy) and a 10-year-old daughter who only listens to headphones.

Jean-Marc escapes reality through extraordinary fantasies, giving Oscar-type speeches to imaginary crowds and appearing on celebrity shows (that have turned sour) while surrounded by gorgeous women who meet his every need. But as his life disintegrates, the sex-fuelled fantasies give way to observations of reality, and hope is found in simple things.

‘His subconscious slowly discovers that even if he was in bed with four gorgeous women, he wouldn’t be able to cope with it,’ says Arcand. ‘So that’s the beginning of wisdom. And the ultimate act of wisdom is that you have to send your dreams away. And then you’ll discover something about your own reality. In the end, an apple is an apple.’