When alone with Sarah, Francis deduces Tom has contacted her and persuaded her to come to the farm and pose as Guillaume's girlfriend, and attacks and makes threatening sexual advances on her.

After being chased by Francis and leaving the community, Tom spots a man at a service station with facial scars matching the bartender's described attack.

After completing his 2012 feature film Laurence Anyways, Dolan felt that "a change of direction was needed" since, in his own words, the previous three movies dealt with the "subject of impossible love".

[3] Having seen a production of the play a year earlier, he met Bouchard at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui after the performance and asked him if anyone else was directing a film adaptation, before saying he would.

This idea was scrapped during the editing process, and he asked the Academy Award-winning composer Gabriel Yared to create the score for the film.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Taut, chilling, and overall engrossing, Tom at the Farm offers further confirmation that writer-director Xavier Dolan is a filmmaking talent to be reckoned with.

[18] In Canada, La Presse critic Marc-André Lussier [fr] gave it three-and-a-half stars, finding it distinct from Dolan's previous works, more Hitchcockian, and praising André Turpin's photography and how Yared's score complemented the story.

[19] Eric Moreault gave it three and a half stars, writing that with its psychology, the film owed as much to Ingmar Bergman as Alfred Hitchcock.

[20] In Voir, Manon Dumais praised Dolan for building on Turpin's photography and Yared's music and drawing on thriller and horror film elements to capture the repressed family and community.

[21] Kate Taylor wrote a negative review in The Globe and Mail, criticising Dolan for reusing similar shots and questioning why Francis would become a social pariah rather than go to prison.

[23] Irish Times' Tara Brady gave it five out of five stars and hailed it as a "work of genius", in which Dolan "transforms Michel Marc Bouchard's source stage play into a unique, enigmatic thriller".

[24] Variety's Guy Lodge also wrote a positive review of the film, citing it as "Dolan's most accomplished and enjoyable work to date, ... also his most commercially viable".

[1] David Ehrlich in his review for Film.com gave the film a rating of 7.7, writing that Tom at the Farm is "seldom less than gripping as an exercise in suspense".