"It looks so small from the outside," we sometimes say to ourselves as we leave a building, "and yet it looked so big on the inside."

That’s roughly how you feel when The Barbarian Invasion ends. You think about everything you’ve seen: a cutting and hilarious satire of the state of Canadian health care and of multilevel bureaucracy, wistful and angry analysis of the decline of thought and discourse, a touching demonstration of heartfelt lifelong friendship, caustic critiques of Quebec Catholicism and global capitalism, a literate demolition of the witlessness of popular history, jabs and body blows to the American way of thinking, a painful and poignant resolution of strife between parents and children… and seven or eight love stories.

Then you look at your watch and gape.

How did director Denys Arcand manage to elegantly squeeze so much into just over 90 minutes?

It hardly matters whether you’ve seen The Decline of the American Empire, the 1986 Arcand film to which this is apparently an unplanned sequel. Sure, the cadre of brainy and loquacious friends returns, but this is a self-contained work, meticulously but not artificially interconnected, artfully whittled to the essential.

Cancer is killing Rémy. He’s not happy about it. His estranged but highly successful investment banker son Sebastien returns reluctantly to Quebec from London to see the father whose neglect and philandering he resents. Heated bed-side discussion ensues, but eventually dad agrees to be moved to be moved from his cramped room on an empty hospital floor, thanks to a preposterous set of deals worked by his son. The friends are summoned from their various haunts: the reunion prompts reflections on the mistakes of youth, the surprises of age. All of this is attended by a rapid-fire accretion of detail–of a kind, sadly, most commonly experienced thanks to The Simpsons.

Then the luminous Nathalie, estranged junkie daughter of one of Rémy’s mistresses, is called in to obtain and administer heroin to the dying man. Marie-Josee Croisée’s performance, deserving winner of at Cannes, levers the film into a whole other realm of poignancy. See her.

The film isn’t perfect. Sometimes the banter and the comedy gets a little too cute. And one sometimes suspects that this is a bit of a male fantasy and Arcand a bit of un phallocrate: the wandering Rémy is surrounded by a coterie of adoring women to the end, and the cast of female characters is composed of mistresses, bitches, spurned wives and dewy angels of mercy. Although Nathalie may, ironically, deliver the most concentrated doses of actual wisdom, most of the smart talk and pretty posture is left to the men.

But Arcand leaves to the viewer the question posed by the title: who are those invading barbarians? Is it the 9/11 terrorists, striking at the heart of The Empire? Or is it unabashed capital, overwhelming Canada’s socialized system? Or are the

Perhaps it’s all of those. The joy of a mature, compact, and multi-layered work like this is that it invite repeated viewing and rediscovery. It warms your heart more deeply than the standard holiday treacle, but this is, all the same, an intelligent, humane, funny and sorrowful Christmas treat.