Careful (1992)

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Kyle McCulloch as Grigorss, Gosia Dobrowolska as Zenaida, Sarah Neville as Klara, Brent Neale as Johann, Paul Cox as Count Knotkers, Victor Cowie as Herr Trotta, Michael O'Sullivan as The Swan Feeder (Dead Husband of Zenaida), Vince Rimmer as Franz

An Abstract Candidate

 

Guy Maddin with Careful makes a film about a mountain community, a very bleakly humoured take on this setting and context, the Germanic society of Tolzbad a community forced to stay in silence to avoid setting off avalanches. It is a precarious place where it is truly a godsend there are rare valleys nearby whose acoustics silence noises, but one where the problem is significant to the point that flocks of geese are so dangerous they need to be shot out of the sky in the perimeters. The film was also a project whose co-writer George Toles explicitly wanted to tackle incest in Careful¹; the setting allows for a really psychologically twisted work of pent up emotions, contrasted by the lush aesthetic and playfully strange whimsy of this timeless world of the non-existent past. The setting, everyone trapped in this isolated high altitude, has lead to these figures having unlocked memories and desires pent up, including for their own parents or ties to them too tight to the point, suffocating, they will duel their widow mother's suitor to the death.

The tale surrounds the sons of the late Swan Feeder (Michael O'Sullivan), a man who will return as a ghost but stuck with his eyes still blinded, losing one as a babe when his mother pressed him too tightly against a brooch with the pin sticking out, the second warning to any viewer of why you do not stand too close to a cuckoo clock when it hits the hour mark. He will have to watch on, and try to warn anyone he can communicate with, at the two act structure of his lineage's perils, the first following Johann the eldest son (Brent Neale), who wishes to marry Klara (Sarah Neville), but has incestuous dreams about his widowed mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska). Johann begins the first of the two acts as he succumbs to "mountain illness, meant to be the curse to climb the mountains, which is warned as very dangerous and having claimed many, but is blatant symbolism of the isolation of this extremely closed and emotionally rigid community which wrought neurosis and suppressed desires, especially in a world where the danger of raised voices causing avalanches is a constant. Johann's introductory story shows how edgy Careful has remained, spying on his mother bathing upside down in the chimney, and his downfall where he concocts a sleeping draught before he cracks in guilt violently, in the moment he was to commit a true transgression, leading to the younger third son Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) to take over the film.

Whilst played with a sick sense of humour, Careful is entirely about the pull of family, one of the most prominent themes of Guy Maddin's filmography, among the many aspects juxtaposing his really eccentric humour against really uncomfortable themes. A lot in his career have had to do with sexuality of all forms and many taboos, which causes his characters over the years to be thrown in melodramatic maelstroms. Grigorss falls for Klara, and inherits Johann's role as the new butler at Count Knotkers' castle, the head of Tolzbad played by Paul Cox, only to learn the truth of Knotkers and his mother's love for each other which was still burning even when she married the Swan Feeder, explaining as well why the oldest brother Franz (Vince Rimmer), who cannot talk and was forced to live in the attic, was stuck ostracised. The connection to family is a theme Guy Maddin has death with even interpreting his own life, or even in a positive way with actress Isabella Rossellini and her legendary filmmaking father Roberto in My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005); in Careful, be it Count Knotkers having his own deceased mother preserved in a sanitised bedroom, or that Klara has a fixation on her own father, jealous of the closer relationship between him and her sister Glenda as the favourite. Her story even leads to the one scene which may be far more problematic, if unintentionally nowadays, in her going as far as deceive Grigorss with a possible false accusation to kill her father, even if there is a whimsical touch involving using the avalanches to do the job. The irony is that barring the tragic passing of his father at a young age, the short The Dead Father (1985) which began the director's career influenced by this, Maddin's upbringing is sweet and eccentric, even recreating his childhood which showed examples of this in a fantastical form for My Winnipeg (2007), so it might surprise he has twisted tales on family like in Careful.

He definitely likes to probe at neurosis, sexual anxiety and the perverse, which will dabble into anything from the band Sparks providing a musical number in The Forbidden Room (2015) about a man mentally crippled by his interesting in the female posterior, to the purely glorious and fun, making a short Sissy Boy Slap Party (1994) entirely about men wearing very little clothing spanking each other. Guy Maddin's work is not overtly messaged, but the themes are there filtered through obsolete cinematic tropes, least in that his work was seen as throwbacks at this stage or when The Heart of the World (2000), a short inspired by Soviet montage editing, brought more influence in editing and production techniques forward in his work. The fantastical and lyrical is contrasted by the incredibly dark or the purely ridiculous, eccentric behaviour portrayed by characters in these films as much part of their mental tapestries. There is even a whole aspect here in Careful of Johann and Grigorss studying in a butler school, which I cannot help but think of in context to Jakob von Gunten, a 1909 novel written by Swiss novelist Robert Walser which is a very unconventional work, and one we had to wait for animators Stephen and Timothy Quay, in their first theatrical film and with actors, to get an official theatrical adaptation in 1995 with Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life. The connection, even if accidental, is perfect for two works dealing with the unconscious wells of desire.

You could not write a review of a Guy Maddin film without talking of the aesthetic, with the additional fact that with Careful, he was starting to move away from playing tribute to silent cinema aesthetics to others, the look here of old photography hand painted in colour after development, contrasted to the tinted scenes in one colour evoking how silent films used this technique with the colours used depending on the context. Maddin's films are very artificial, even when using old film and TV footage to retell Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as The Green Fog (2017), Careful having a rustic artificiality with ornate homemade set design, feeling of the 18th century in fact but with details like phonographs existing which effect the sense of time and setting being clearly placed. There is even a deliberate crackle in the soundtrack like an old vinyl which emphasis the sense of this entire being a relic, ironic knowing that the themes I have mentioned of Guy Maddin's, whilst over-the-top, are very real in subject, the hyper exaggerated filmic nature of Careful as if influenced by the plots. The safeguard this artificially created world of Tolzbad becomes allows for Maddin to deal with themes in a way to soften their blow, when he does include some incredibly dark content as talked of in this narrative.

This would be followed by a road bump in his career, with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) becoming a maligned work, marking Careful and that film as the last of the first era of his career where the editing and production design were not as explicitly part of the texture of his work as later, more staged dramas in their tone in his first act as a director. I view Twilight... as an underrated film, but one which lead to a period of short films, but nothing in terms of theatrical length work until Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002). The Heart of the World was a jump start to his career, but also emphasised that, to tell these tales about neurosis, their tactile natures as films included using silent film techniques like intertitles more explicitly, using the editing more, and into the 2010s, Maddin embraced another turn into explicit digital post-production. Careful however marks a point, more overt than his previous films, Archangel (1990) and his first film Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), where one of his most distinct features, melodramas about the traps psychologically and sexually which ensnare usually male leads, became really prominent, and alongside being a great film in its own right in a strong filmography, Careful becomes as important for this reason too for the context.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric/Melodramatic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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1) Interviewed for Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), a Maddin retrospective documentary from this first era of the Canadian filmmaker's career.

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Gretchen Krich as Mother; Cathleen O'Malley as Young Mother; Susan Corzatte as Old Mother; Sullivan Brown as Young Guy Maddin; Erik Steffen Maahs as Older Guy Maddin; Maya Lawson as Sis; Jake Morgan-Scharhon as Chance Hale/Wendy Hale; Todd Moore as Father; Clayton Corzatte as Old Father; Andrew Loviska as Savage Tom; Kellan Larson as Neddie

An Abstract Candidate

 

A womb opening up like a window!

Arguably this, a remembrance in twelve chapters, was a holy grail to finally reach for me, able to finally witness what was originally a Guy Maddin production screened with on stage narrators and live to the images on the silver screen, and became available in its Criterion Collection release form with numerous narrators to choose from. The opening already sets up what to expect by linking the erotic to stabbing knives and violence, and you can tell this is a Guy Maddin film eventually, if it did not click before, when an older mother figure is chewing the side off a boy in the finale. This is notwithstanding his trademark of naming leads after himself, this Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs in the bookends, Sullivan Brown through his childhood memories) with his own neurosis to unpack as he returns to the family lighthouse after thirty years. He returns to Black Notch to repaint to the home for his ailing mother, only for “spurts of memories” to return to Guy of his childhood, one which is a calamity of neurosis to unpick for countless reasons.

At a lighthouse which was an orphanage and Dad was a scientist always working, when this childhood involves the orphan boys’ leader Savage Tom conducting black masses you see how Guy's life was one full of said neurosis, especially as there is a mother complex from one who is overprotective, traumatizing her children with guilt, threatening to sell the lighthouse to keep Guy in line, and badgers her eldest daughter for being an older sister, interesting in the opposite sex and secretly smoking. It is clear Guy had enough neurosis to unpack already, but as with other Maddin films, this cannot be enough, as it turns out however his parents are up to no good experiments using the orphans, which brings Wendy Hale (Jake Morgan-Scharhon), the celebrity sister of a brother-and-sister team of teen detectives to the island to investigate this.

To those with no prior knowledge on Guy Maddin, his career has taken various influences from older cinema technique, but a key period post The Heart of the World (2000), a short which won him acclaim, was silent cinema in its various guises, from Soviet montage to Gothic German Expressionism. His career is more diverse than this, and he still can have sound here, but his fascination at this point with monochrome films, with using visuals and intertitles for emphasis, and creating intertitles you would never get in older films from the twenties, was his own distinct take on them. With the addition of the narrator, who (depending on what version you watch) varies from Isabelle Rossellini to even Crispin Glover, the tapestry of his filmmaking style is just as eclectic as the strange melodramas he makes, here the corrupt lighthouse orphanage, and the mother and father’s obsession with collecting “nectar” even from their own children, rivaled by the amount of queer and heterosexual sexual tension in the midst of this. This is especially as Wendy Hale decides to pose as her own brother to investigate this case, falling in love with Guy’s older sister (Maya Lawson) after a secret game of spin the bottle, and Guy having a crush with Wendy Hale in her normal clothes which will become complicated in terms of his and others’ sexuality.

As with all Guy Maddin films, this is not the end of this. The unconventional rituals are here, with the "kissing gloves" that allow one's wearer to kiss and touch someone, alongside the fact that the nectar conspiracy involves the mother's desire to use it to become young again, even down to a baby, with further contentious psychosexual content involved. Sexual anxiety is rife, and as with other Guy Maddin films, this is within its own distinct logic and tone. The style is entirely of his own and, using the silent cinema techniques to add an energy to the proceedings one minute, using it to add to the ghosts literally haunting the lighthouse in the present the next, Brand Upon the Brain shows his skill at this point, a style he would eventually move from into new ones with digital technology into the 2010s. Again, to see a key piece of his cinema, missing for me, was rewarded with a film that is as deliciously weird and yet still imaginative as this.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Bram Stoker (Original novel); Mark Godden (Ballet)

Cast: Zhang Wei-Qiang as Dracula; Tara Birtwhistle as Lucy Westenra; David Moroni as Dr. Van Helsing; CindyMarie Small as Mina; Johnny Wright as Jonathan Harker; Stephane Leonard as Arthur Holmwood; Matthew Johnson as Jack Seward; Keir Knight as Quincy Morris; Brent Neale as Renfield; Stephanie Ballard as Mrs. Westernra

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

[Intertitle] Betrothed by a scream...

I vividly remember Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary screening on Sky Arts, a satellite channel in the United Kingdom for "cultural" programming. Alongside John Cassavetes films I was sadly too young to appreciate, unless I have made up the memory, I swear to this was a broadcasting choice too. I would not be surprised if it was true too, as this is the one film, alongside its old DVD release from Tartan Films that many have likely seen this film Maddin and few others until his later productions after. Sadly, now, this does reflect an unfortunate realisation, that Maddin when being "artful" was easier to sell than pure, unadulterated films from his career. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is still a good film, undoubtedly, and I will not dismiss it at all with that comment. Instead, it does present the fact that, originally produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), this ironically managed what Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) was supposed to be, a more mainstream version of the auteur's style, only for both to be with their quirks. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs felt the more mainstream of his style, one which both felt a weird and distinct film, but trapped with trying to restrict his visual down to something more digestible. This is contrasted in Dracula, adapting Bram Stoker's novel with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, a more appreciated film that, continuing the style of stylisation from his tribute the silent cinema instead, did succeed.

Maddin is still here, not hiding for example that this is a metaphor for xenophobia and fear of immigrants in England, as this skips directly to when Dracula (as played by Zhang Wei-Qiang) travels across the sea to England in a casket full of burial earth. The quirks of Maddin are here, depicting this in his monochrome fantasia, be it Lucy Westenra's mother living in a glass box or when, as Dracula has bitten her and started feeding from her blood close to her death, Van Helsing literally rests her on an entire bed of garlic. Jonathan Hawker and his wife Mina do eventually appear in the narrative, and Jonathan's trip to Dracula's castle in Europe is eventually depicted as flashback, but this is fascinating for devoting its first half entirely on Lucy, a figure who is a minor if important one within Stoker's novel. Having Lucy centre of place, though her narrative becomes tragic and gruesome as in other adaptations, does really stand out as a distinction for this adaptation; more so in that with Mina Hawker, especially in versions by Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog (even F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922)) taking centre stage in a few prominent adaptations. Mina here does too, but arguably to lesser extent.

The decision to tell the tale through ballet is distinct. I will be brutally honest in saying some of Maddin's style, wonderfully on display with intertitles and fast editing, does not work simply because he cuts around the choreography too much at times. It is clearly intentional, but it feels out of place when the pair could have coordinated together perfectly. Other times, however, it works a treat. At one point, with Dracula trying to get into Lucy's bedroom, with pirouetting demons bounding around the bed, even pole dancing on the bed frame for a lack of term, feels like Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (1922) if adapted for ballet. Using the style he fully embraced by this point with films like The Heart of the World (2000), juxtaposed with uses as a monochrome film with striking colour (usually blood) painted on the images for effect, Maddin's take on Dracula is still a good version. Using the dance performances to retell the story adds its own logic too. For even those meant to represent fight scenes, having scenes which are depicted in the dancers' emotions in movement, with intertitles helping for context, makes sense for the director to have done. Considering how unconventional his storytelling aspects are in other films, to have his most conventional narrative told in this distinct way is an apt contrast.

It is a version told with fascination of the material even if it subverts it. It parts it is faithful to the tone. This proves you cannot cast a bad Renfield unless you really screw the pooch, and likewise here Brent Neale does a great deal just by gurning and looking as appropriately mad. Zhang Wei-Qiang as the silent but dashing Dracula really does a great deal, when Dracula can and has been cast badly, such as Lon Chaney Jr., try as he might, not really working even back in the Universal Horror days of Son of Dracula (1943). Maddin's sense of the macabre is found here eventually, where Renfield experiences interrogating by trepanning, and in mind to the sexual metaphors the vampire can have, with Mina just flat out trying to seduce her husband only for his experience within Dracula's castle to be unabashedly homoerotic. Only knowing Francis Ford Coppola managed to get away with a high budget Hollywood film with explicit nudity and gore undercuts what this has returning to the film; that this is still a more accessible film from Guy Maddin, a gateway production, but is a more subtly grittier take on the source until you start getting into the more exploitation adaptations; this is quaint next to Maddin's other work, but the tone is there.

Maddin's take on Bram Stoker's famous story, retold in ballet and silent film storytelling, is still an incredibly unique film. It is for me not one of his best, but it is certainly a little gem in itself, ironically one that would the perfect way to sell Maddin's other films, the gateway film. It is, with what it does, a jumping off point as rightly would champion this work's great virtues and lead to the others.

Stump the Guesser (2020)

Director: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

Screenplay: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

Cast: Adam Brooks as The Guesser; Brent Neale as Trofim; Stephanie Berrington as Y / Other Sister; Thaller as Z

An Abstract Candidate

 

A short from Guy Maddin, these films from his career despite their length, this one created with Evan and Galen Johnson, are always as distinct as his longer work even in just twenty minutes here. Certainly you cannot escape the premise's allure, where in this nocturnal world there are carnival guessers, figures played by Adam Brooks, who can almost psychically guess how many fish a man has hidden on his persons or which chambers of a pistol have bullets in them for improvised Russian Roulette, all for prizes of various kinds given out if anyone was to manage to stump the guesser. A registered job requiring a license, with the actual skill tested to be 99% accurate or have the license revoked, even if you use "guessing milk" to assist the power you can loss this work, which is what happens when the Guesser of this ends up losing his. Happening as with so many Guy Maddin male protagonists, it all begins when he lusts over a woman and his libido controls him, a constant narrative touch which is never condemning the women in his work in a misogynistic slant at all, but always condemning men to be driven by his lusts. The woman he loves (Stephanie Berrington) also happens to be his long lost sister, which causes issues as incest is a no-no and gets you red marks of shame on your record.

Befitting a Maddin film, even the sexual desire has a transgressive aspect as, when he loses his job, the carnival guesser is fixated on overcoming this legal law against incest, even if it means taking a role helping a scientist in disproving genetic family trees. By this point, Maddin's ability to create compelling, even perversely witty realities of any length is unparallel. Little things grow beyond this too enriching the work for me as a long time fan, such as the encroaching clarity of how much Socialism and its iconography has influenced his films as an obsession, when one of the prizes in this guessing game for a one shot joke is a Trotsky-bear, which is literally what it sounds like with a plush toy with the face of the noted Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky that includes his trademark beard.

The one trait which became a permanent fixture over time is how Evan and Galen Johnson have been permanent co-directors since The Forbidden Room (2015), and it is clear their involvement come with Maddin's greater use of computer effects. Whilst it may disappoint how a director like Maddin, who once shot a lost film in a garage with sets (Love-Chaunt in the Chimney), has decided to build his worlds now digitally, but it is also clear that, never the purist of cinema in the slightest from the beginning, his tributes to silent cinema also toyed with and re-used in different new aesthetic ways, with this new stage in his career that one where he revels in the artificiality of the digital look. This could be a perverse comparison, as the later is a director who is not screened on streaming sites like MUBI or at art festivals, but I cannot help but think of practical effects creator and low budget horror film director Joe Castro, who suddenly in the 2010s changed to a similar type of filmmaking based around heavy green screen use and deliberately artificial aesthetics. His work, with all its CGI gore, I compliment with this comparison as imagining Hieronymus Bosch if he binged on internet meme aesthetic, original goregrind era Carcass album covers and splatter films with a sense of horror vacui to Castro's work after the 2010s of not wanting to leave the amount of empty space he had in his earlier 2000s films. Maddin is the same in his own way, even close to horror vacui too at times with the look of his newer films, always having the grain and damaged film look even when the films are clearly digitally made, or how from The Forbidden Room on, he eventually depicts mental collapse or tension with a little blitz of the visuals. When the Guesser is forced to make a final guess for happiness, a level of visual barrage greets the viewer which is pushing what he accomplished with acclaim for the short The Heart of the World (2000).

The world here has a heightened mood entirely different to his earlier work but still refining what he did before with new collaborators, such as tiny touches as using colour against monochrome, like having to guess the eye colour of a woman who turns out to be your sister). Far from feeling like a compromise, all I would ever regret with Maddin teaming up with Evan and Galen Johnson is if he entirely jettisoned the stage bound sets of earlier films, and that side to his career as a result. Thankfully, even if it means melding the two more than he has done in the 2010s on for a wonderful hybrid, that is still being felt with films like this.  Stump the Guesser as it stands is another fascinating work and, as just twenty minutes long, is rich enough in what is told in its little narrative even in the little storytelling touches you can miss out on - that the Guesser, as a master when we meet him, even wanders his living quarters with others blindfolded, with a side of his sleeping blanket marked for heads and feet he cannot see and is meant to get the right way up, something which goes amiss when he starts to fail in this work and obsesses over his sister. This has enough richness in narrative, including its final punch line, left with a metal bird toy, to be a worthy part of Guy Maddin's work even among the feature length titles.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: George Toles

Inspired by the novel Pan by Knut Hamsun

Cast: Nigel Whitmey as Peter Glahn; Pascale Bussières as Juliana Kossel; Shelley Duvall as Amelia Glahn; Frank Gorshin as Cain Ball; Alice Krige as Zephyr Eccles; R.H. Thomson as Dr. Issac Solti

An Abstract Candidate

 

Returning to Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, I see where this would have been a dead end for Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin as much as I am going to say it is incredibly underrated. I am not surprised of how this came to be a frustrating production for Maddin, who was recording for the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997) from this film's set looking miserable. It is the closest thing to his mainstream film, the moment in any filmmaker with an auteurist's career where, like a non-American and non-English language director making their first Hollywood, their film can either lead to them going into the Hollywood filmmaker or led to their most contentious work. This has recognisable names like Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin, and was shot in 35mm film, where Maddin's usually visual aesthetic was toned down. This is still a film, as we will get into, where the idea of this being his tame film is absurd, as one piece of dialogue talks of Gorshin, who famously played the Riddler in the nineteen sixties Batman television series, having had his penis torn off on a chair nail in his past. Where the film's frustrations for Maddin clearly are, and why for one film this is a fascinating gem for him, is entirely how Twilight of the Ice Nymphs tells its story, setting up iots elegant yet eerie mood with the title card among red dirt and bodies of broken statues in the ground.

This is definitely more a drama for him, where former political prisoner Peter Glahn (Nigel Whitmey) returns back to his home of Mandragora and his sister Amelia Glahn (Shelley Duvall), who is running an ostrich farm in a contentious relationship with Cain Ball (Gorshin), an older handyman promised the deeds to the farm and kicking a stink when this comes under threat. This is also another film where Maddin tackles his obsession with heterosexual desire and the folly of the male libido, caught between two women. One is Zephyr Eccles (Alice Krige), a woman baring child who devotes herself to the woodland; the other he is obsessed with Juliana Kossel (Pascale Bussières), a woman he meets on his boat trip home, the likely mistress of Dr. Issac Solti (R.H. Thomson), a figure left disabled on a walking cane as a result of a statue of the goddess Venus he has managed to uncover in the land, one which may possess actual connection to the goddess when Zephyr gives herself to Venus for Peter. The immediately thing to bear in mind is how more dialogue heavy this is, and whilst it is definitely a Maddin film in his quirks and dark sense of humour, the huge elephant in the room is that, whilst aesthetically gorgeous, this is Maddin's most restrained film aesthetically, with long dialogue scenes and none of his editing techniques to tell story, which is a drastic change of pace for him.

Onscreen, this slowly builds to the kind of whims and perversity of Guy Maddin's other work in its dialogue, still transgressive when Zephyr has a monologue of the erotic fears of seeing girl help a bull insert itself in a cow. This leads to morbid tales of two sisters, their skulls still refusing to face each other after death, whose hatred become so bad one drove a nail into the other's skull, to be reflected back again when it is used as inspiration for a spat resolver. That this has known actors neither undercuts this, merely the psychosexual content and anxieties are thankfully given to an actor like Shelley Duvall, someone who has always been underappreciated and here fits the mood. The film is one, like other Maddin work, with their complicated anxieties, where the male lead is frankly irredeemable, with a clear psychotic side, and where everyone adds to the film alongside Maddin's compelling dialogue. The plot itself - with Alice Krige as a woman who escaped her marriage with assistance of a poisonous snake filled "Bad Night Bog", a love rivalry between her Zephyr and Juliana over Peter, and Peter and his own sister's growing dark sides - fully conforms to Maddin's other work in how things get weird, escalate and (as usually happens) someone gets gravely injured.

The film also looks beautiful. After its initial mood, feeling its low budget artificiality, the film starts to take this to its advantage with an almost plastic-like dreamy tone, pagan at times with its many woodland and beach scenes. The colour aesthetic eventually becomes the hugest influencer on this film for the better, such as when the scenes take place in Dr. Issac Solti's home, here emphasising that for a director know for his silent film aesthetics, including many black and white productions, Maddin here and with films like Careful (1992) when he uses colour is exceptional alongside his collaborators in using it. You can even make the true compliment with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs that he is almost touching Raul Ruiz's best examples of extreme colour lighting in his own most delirious films.

Any film where Frank Gorshin, drunk, burps at an actual ostrich cannot be ditched into obscurity. The problem is clearly that, even if he did not have the stress of working on this film to sully it, Maddin if he had succeeded with this film could have suffocated his career. It is clear where the film feels a dead end even if one I find a great deal to admire. Here for a one-off, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is an underrated film from his career, and it is fascinating to see his hands tied for his aesthetic tricks, showing his dialogue and storytelling skills. But it suits a one-off only - never was there a man, whilst his dialogue is proven to be quirky and memorable, who if he had his style restricted would have lost half of his talents onscreen. Whilst a virtuous film in content, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs also does emphasis his talents in his other films tenfold.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Workbooks Collection (2005)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Canon Fodder

 

Known also as Love-Chaunt in the Chimney, at least in the Zeitgeist DVD release of Cowards Bend the Knees (2003) which have these as an extra, this is among the many of Guy Maddin's career of feature length and short length films, but with the irony that, long before the Seance (2016) project, where he resurrected the lost movies of directors from Mikio Naruse to Ernst Lubitsch, Maddin himself has a lost film these are connected to. Seance, originally set up as a recorded live performance between Paris and Canada, became The Forbidden Room (2015), Maddin's delirious multi-narrative-within-narrative film, whilst the films also called the Workbooks Collection are just shorts from a project which was lost in a fire¹. This is a ghost, fused together and rebuilt from the remnants, including a tie-in to Cowards Bend the Knees.

The films are FuseBoy, Rooster Workbook, Zookeeper Workbook, Chimney Workbook, Audition 01 and Audition 02, blurring the lines between what survives of this project from the late nineties and Audition 02, which connects to Cowards Bend the Knees, a Guy Maddin film which does exist. This lost film started after Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a 1997 production that for me was a pleasant experience but is not historically the best period for Guy Maddin. A documentary from the time, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), shows a miserable Guy Maddin, who eventually hated Twilight of the Ice Nymph, which was not seen as a popular work, and a terrible and frustrating experience to the point that the documentary almost has a near-memoriam tone of Maddin imagining his career ending. Made in his garage, some at the Winnipeg Film Group Studio¹, his solution to overcome that experience was a film entirely self produced with improvisation.

How it would have compiled together, an amalgamation of Herman Melville short stories stuck together with assistance from George Toles, is a question for me of interest as, including the two Audition films, the lost film's surviving forms are a curious set of experimental pieces entirely about mood. They precede the fetishishtic nature of Cowards Bend the Knees, the most overtly sexual film of his career, as well as touch a similar nature to old George Kuchar and Jack Smith films as improvised low budget productions literally filmed at points in the director's garage. Rooster Workbook is probably the most explicit, in which a nude woman crawls through homemade crawlspaces, whilst feathers and a rooster populate the visions in rapid fire, repeating scenes in the editing. Fuseboy, starring Guy Maddin regular Louis Negin, is the most implicitly erotic, at least in how Negin, in just tighty whities, plays a man possessed by an erotic memory of three younger men (or one his younger self with two) shirtless erotically mucking about fixing electric fuses.  

With Zookeepers Workbook, Maddin even explicitly references Les Chants de Maldoror, Comte de Lautréamont's transgressive novel which, cosnidering its high art status, is also a work where the God-hating transgressive lead has sex with a female shark, surprisingly more transgressive than even Maddin's own work at times but befitting someone, whilst more whimsically transgressive in his films, to reference. Most of the shorts also, shot in standard definition, feel even if from afterwards like prototypes from The Heart of the World (2000), a short film that, when it was commissioned and debuted at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, was a huge turning point positively for Maddin with its Soviet rapid fire editing and aesthetical tributes. These shorts are to be absorbed, his obsessions felt like mood tapes with their repeating images, the Audition shorts, the first for Fuseboy, the later with cast from Cowards Bend the Knees, a curious pair to include but yet befitting, suddenly Maddin turning the viewfinder on his productions themselves. They all, whatever they call them, are a fascinating collection.

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1) As talked of briefly in Offscreen for An Interview with Guy Maddin: Dissecting the Branded Brain by David Church for Volume 10, Issue 1 in January 2006

Cowards Bend The Knees (Or The Blue Hands) (2003)

 

Dir. Guy Maddin                 

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Cast: Darcy Fehr as Guy Maddin; Melissa Dionisio as Meta; Amy Stewart as Veronica; Tara Birtwhistle as Liliom; Louis Negin as Dr. Fusi; Mike Bell as Mo Mott; David Stuart Evans as Shaky; Henry Mogatas as Chas; Victor Cowie as Maddin Sr.

An Abstract Candidate Re-Evaluation

 

Guy Maddin is an experimental director yet he is not stereotypically avant-garde, his trademark style completely linkable to past aesthetics - silent film aesthetics with intertitles jostled against dialogue films, post-CGI affects, or between specific colour styles to monochrome. Varying per film, they are still his own. Guy Maddin can proudly claim every film of his is unique and distinct to the others, which even applies to his short film making, which few directors can do. Originally designed as an installation piece made more candid as a peepshow exhibition, separated into chapters as sixty plus minute epic altogether, Coward Bend the Knees even for Guy Maddin is his most overtly lewd, sexual and at times perverse whilst Maddin drags Maddin through the dirt.

Literally, as Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr), an ice hockey player, is introduced, at a back alley abortion clinic in the back of a hairdresser's which is also a bordello, leaving his girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) to die of an illegal abortion to lust after Meta (Melissa Dionisio). All is this is whilst in mid-operation, as he eyes the daughter of Liliom (Tara Birtwhistle), owner of a hair dressers. Meta wants revenge on her mother and her younger lover Shaky (David Stuart Evans), the captain of the ice hockey team, for murdering her father, loving to her and his hands blue because of the dyes used in his hairdressing work. Very clearly fixated on him to the point it is uncomfortably sexual, Meta plans to have her late father's persevered hands grafted onto Maddin, only for Dr. Fusi (Maddin regular Louis Negin) to throw them in the bin and paint Maddin's hands blues to pretend it was completed. I would not be surprised if Guy Maddin was evoking films like The Hands of Orlac (1924), the Austrian silent film great Conrad Veidt, as a pianist whose hands are destroyed in a train accident, is horrified to learn he may have had the hands of a murderer surgically attached to him, Maddin the director, having Maddin the star as a figure tempted by Meta to murder her mother and Shaky with the promise of her body, his hands seemingly possessed by the ghost of her father despite being his original ones painted blue.

And yet he ends up with Liliom, and Veronica, despite dying, comes back as a ghost/doppelganger working in the hairdressers and is having a relationship with Maddin Sr. (Victor Cowie), Guy's father. Somehow, in only sixty minutes, this perverse blackly humoured work juggles between intentionally falling off the rails and being tied up in a cohesive structure. Maddin deliberately goes against the notion that any event has to be the same as the rest of a story's structure, letting the events dictate the structure instead, including those that go into the completely absurd and goes against conventional rationalisation. For those not used to his cinema, this content exists in its own logic, that of lurid and unpredictable cinema from a yesteryear, a yesteryear that does not exist and comes from its own plane of reality. For those used to Maddin like myself, Cowards Bend the Knees is, even for a director who tackled taboos from the beginning, his most overtly lurid film.

Details like the onscreen male full frontal nudity in the post-hockey game showers, to Melissa Dionisio's nude scenes, to the set-up being that the narrative is taking place in semen being scrutinised under a microscope, Maddin is not kidding himself in the explicitness here. Gender balancing is found the poking of the male body as well as the female, which actually does happen when a large pare of buttocks is confused for a doorbell, scrutinising masculinity even to the point of a large close-up of Maddin Sr's penis as he used a urinal being witnessed when someone has the unfortunate position of trying to use the one just by him with no hands. Even the weird kinks the director-writer is known for feel more perverse here, like Maddin Sr. having, whilst commentating on hockey games, a breast carved from ice he fondles mid-match even with Vernonica's double on his arm. Even without the sexual edge, Cowards Bend the Knees befittingly is not your ordinary murder revenge story, particularly when it also has an ice hockey museum in the lofts of the ice rink, full of wax mannequins of dead hockey players who may not actually be dead, a clash with the elite Soviet ice hockey team of concern, out-of-left-field sexual practices not even seen in some porn, and blue filter, in a black and white film, to show the majesty of blue hands. It feels like Maddin, to the point he puts himself under the guillotine, fully investing in emasculating the male gender in its worse. A trademark I have seen in his films has been how much his work has been about men and their sexual libidos for all the worst aspects, emasculating them in the process.

Guy Maddin is a director to draw on obsessions and material almost dreamt of and does not soften them to seem conventionally rational to the viewer. To purposely undercut narrative conventions with non-sequiturs, absurdity, and bookend his works in narratives-within-narratives, here it is more intimate as, if My Winnipeg (2007) is entirely accurate in telling his own biography, Maddin grew up living above a hairdressers, whilst having both ice hockey part of his blood and a father who ran their team in Winnipeg.  His work is also an ode to cinema, not only to the film making techniques of the past, arcane rather than nostalgia, contacting once dead cinematic practices, but also an ode to the lack of pristine gloss. The concept of viewing films scratched up and with jittering frames is something we find sad to witness, desiring these films preserved, but there is something irresistible to seeing them with scratches too, textures that makes them unique compared to other films. In Cowards Bend The Knees, the images are also shown through a circle surrounded by complete black, of its peepshow origins and very old silent films, made to look like a blurred and damaged film print Maddin discovered in a basement of a Canadian home, sordid hyper stylised thrills that would have gotten the scissors on it by censors back in granddad's day. Frames moves and the actors are at points distorted into figures of pure grain as they are clear and beautiful in portraying these exaggerated archetypes. Entirely silent, with intertitles, it charges ahead with its content in quick, sharply edited images clearly learnt from Soviet propaganda cinema. The content itself manages to be shocking and surprising, yet this style compiles it all together into one cohesive whole.  He manages to depict consensual fisting just in Soviet montage, whilst being entirely unsubtle about it in a way evoking Sergei Eisenstein, a man who, alongside his genius was also very sexual open, someone who would have probably approved the scene with delight.

What does it say as well about the director when he names his less-than-great protagonist after himself? It may be fantastical in tone, but the ecstatic truth, to quote Werner Herzog, is that in doing so, Maddin admits with Maddin the character - spineless, a coward, a killer - failings he might have encountered in himself or other men subconsciously shown through the scenarios shown onscreen, exaggerated to an extreme. Then there are the autobiographical aspects. Maddin's mother in the role of Meta's blind grandmother, that he grew up with ice hockey, his father coaching an actual hockey team, as well as hairdressing being part of a family business. He would later go on to make the poignant and funny My Winnipeg which directly examined his titular Canadian homeland and his life, but in placing his own memories within content like this with its killer hands, and Elektra based influences and perversions, it is far from undermining it but using the absurd and perverse content to amplify and examine the effect these reminiscences. By way of dreams and the logic of a b-movie cum German Expressionist influence horror movies, what is enjoyable as a spectacle by itself means more when he is bringing a subconscious confession to this film, even through psychotronic, erotic murder melodrama and literary meanings. It also makes this a far better cult film than many others for providing more in its sixty minutes than most films. That the film does not end happily, yet feels perversely charming for the deaths, disappointments and someone taking their place in the wax mannequin hall of fame feels apt.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eerie/Perverse/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

The Dead Father (1986)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Cast: D.P. Snidal as The Dead Father, Margaret Anne MacLeod as The Widow; John Harvie as The Son; Angela Heck as The Daughter; Rachel Toles as Little Girl I; Jilian Maddin as Little Girl II; Stephen Snyder as Cesar

Ephemeral Waves

 

A short review for a short film, this is the first work by Guy Maddin and, whilst the presentation would improve over the years and decades, the Canadian auteur began with dealing with neurosis and psychodrama from the start. Told in first person, this is one of the many unfinished books for the protagonist being written of his life, one of which is the compelling title "My Fear of Bushes", which immediately set up Maddin's interest in curious personal behaviours, ticks and obsessions.

What story is told however is The Dead Father, as much a reflection, if accurate to the bio of Maddin in his own My Winnipeg (2007), to the death of his own father, whilst not quite the conventional tale of grief and overcoming the loss of a young one you would normally get either. Most films on grief do not lead to the son eating his father's stomach and contents with a spoon, but despite the late patriarch of the family in this short being dead, he is like a Raúl Ruiz character. When his prone body is not on the family dining table, that late does wake and wander. More uncomfortable for the family than this, which is just accepted as a matter-of-fact occurrences, behaving as he normally did, is that he wanders to a different address, fully alert and awake but preferring someone else's home to his wife and children's.

Early, at the beginning of his career, the aesthetic of Guy Maddin's work is not here. It is crude, knowing that Maddin himself would continue making as many short films and return to the medium over the decades, an era as important to his career (like The Heart of the World (2000)) as it is an area worthy of introspection in itself, his craft being sharpened just by telling his own short stories as it has been with the feature length titles. Saying The Dead Father is crude is not an insult, as this still has the psychodramatic nature of his work that would last into the decades on, only in primordial form. Parents haunting their children, even when still alive, becomes a significant trope of his work which is here, as is the tinges of very twisted sense of humour which can be bleak yet is compelling to see. This does compel, and shooting in black and white, he begins with his desire to work in an unconventional aesthetic. Knowing this as well, Guy Maddin also came from the school of independent budget cinema from the eighties, and the arch of unconventional Canadian cinema from this era. Growing into his later films, The Dead Father is important as a step, one where Guy Maddin would become a truly unique filmmaker, the template found here in pieces.

Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Cast: Kyle McCulloch as Einar the Lonely, Michael Gottli as Gunnar; Angela Heck as Snjófridur; Margaret Anne MacLeod as Amma; Heather Neale as the Granddaughter; David Neale as the Grandson; Don Hewak as John Ramsay; Ron Eyolfson as Pastor Osbaldison; Chris Johnson as Dufferin; Donna Szöke as the Fish Princess

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a tale-within-tales, told by an Icelandic grandmother to her grandchildren on their mother's deathbed, when people scrubbed themselves with hay, and at a smallpox epidemic hospital, surgery is done with puppet shows than using anaesthesia. The first feature film by Guy Maddin, the legendary Canadian filmmaker, it feels like the first work from a director who would flesh out his career more as he went on, perfecting it. Like the ill-advised decision to have a blackface character, back when it was presumed to be ironic to comment on minstrel performances but still problematic, Tales from the Gimli Hospital does feel like a very early work from a director who, from his next Archangel (1990) onwards, would completely iron out and perfect his unique filmmaking style.

What Gimli is on inspection is Maddin tentatively making his steps into cinema, a cult film among those smaller budget genre movies made independently with no true discernible genre. Like those films, Maddin's unique personality is there immediately, and a thing to admire, but he was able to fully flesh out his aesthetic interests more as he went on. Here he is only flirting with his fascination with older art styles is cinema, silent cinema intertitles and coloured filtered the only touch stones to be found, Gimli follows a man named Einar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch) who, in a community of Icelandic emigrants to Canada's outer wilds, is interred in a hospital during a small pox outbreak in the past. Canadian history becomes a pool for Guy Maddin's psychodramatic stories, and just plain weird imagery and behaviours as, meeting a rotund but loved fellow patient named Gunnar (Michael Gottli), who engages the female nurses and cuts out fish from tree bark to pass the time. Einar becomes jealous of his fellow patient's ability to interest the nurses. Sexually frustrated, neither does it help that when Gunnar reveals a tragic past of losing a woman he loved, who came to the small pox hospital with him and eventually succumbed whilst caring from him, Einar is involved in a way emphasising early how Maddin likes, even in seemingly jovial patsiches, to have dark humoured and transgressive content in his work.

Shot in grainy 16mm, Gimli already establishes the plot style of future Maddin films but is slighter, when other narratives became more grandiose and even over-the-top with the later productions. Gimli is a slight film just in length, only over an hour, and even against another short film of a similar length, Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), this could have been thinly spread if any longer whilst the later Maddin film was a psychodrama of strangeness that felt incredibly crammed into a similar length. This is an early work from Maddin, but the flirting of his creativity is here. The strange behaviours and sights, which casually appear and then vanish, of his characters make their appearance already, like surgical puppetry as mentioned, as does the fact large portions of his career are frankly about the neurosis of the heterosexual man. It is befitting he loosely remade Alfred Hitckcock's Vertigo (1958), with Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, using existing footage from San Francisco made productions called The Green Fog (2017), as Maddin would probably be happy to admit his career has devoted large portions of itself (even scrutinising himself) about the neurosis and destructive natures of men in lust.

Here, the outcome breaks out in a man going blind due to emotional shock and, closer to the old silent films he is referring to, Einar stumbling on a fish queen preceding over a chorus of female dancers from children to grown women. To say that this is one of his weakest films for me is actually a virtue as, the first for Maddin as a feature length work, he starts well and would considerably improve upon this. The sense he was already progressing at this stage was with a fragment deleted from the film but remade into a short by itself, Hospital Fragment (2000). A surreal piece, of erotic desire encased within a secret space, of a nude man and woman housed in a small container looking out at bare-chested men slapping dead fish together, the woman entrapped in nets, an eruption of psychosexual intensity with the early use of Maddin of rapid editing that would come to his cinema alongside more techniques. Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a good film still, but the sense of it being a launching pad is also felt as, after, he would develop and grow more as a director significantly and immediately.

Abstract Spectrum: Strange

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

The Forbidden Room (2015)

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Directors: Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson

Screenplay: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk, John Ashbery and Kim Morgan

Cast: Roy Dupuis (as Cesare); Clara Furey (as Margot); Louis Negin (as Marv/Smithy/Mars/Organizer/Mr. Lanyon); Udo Kier (as Count Yugh/The Butler/The Dead Father/Guard /Pharmacist); Gregory Hlady (as Jarvis/Dr. Deane/A Husband); Mathieu Amalric (as Thadeusz M___/Ostler); Noel Burton (as Wolf/Pilot/The Captain)

Synopsis: Based on Guy Maddin's Séance project, live and filmed performance pieces where lost films are "conjured" like spirits in acted out séances, The Forbidden Room is a series of stories within stories within stories. From a monologue about taking a bath from actor Louis Negin, the bathwater leads to men trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the sea with explosive jelly and rapidly depleting oxygen trying to find their captain. A lumberjack inexplicably appears leading to dreams and reflections that lead to dreams and reflections of those in the first ones. Of the lumberjack trying to rescue a woman Margot (Furey) from thieves, of aswang vampire bananas, poison absorbing leotards, Mathieu Amalric as a man living in an elevator killing his butler to cover up using his possessions as his wife's birthday gift, Udo Kier's ghost giving his son his moustache so he can pretend to be him for his blind mother (Maria de Medeiros), Kier also as a man obsessed with derrieres as sang by legendary duo Sparks and various forms of madness beyond that.

From the above synopsis, The Forbidden Room can claim to be out-there even for Guy Maddin, the Canadian hauntologist of films existing in alternative worlds like Careful (1992) to Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary (2002). Co-director with Evan Johnson, this is amongst Maddin's most surreal films, an obsessive tribute to cinema that has sadly perished to the spectre of time or never got made. The film's from the Séance project, recreated here to, including works from legendary directors like Jean Vigo to Erich von Stroheim; for example, the tale of the son wearing his late father's moustache to comfort his mother is based on a lost Mikio Naruse work called The Strength of a Moustache (1931). Doing this Maddin and Johnson decided to take a page out of the film adaptation of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) of relishing storytelling for its own sake, the stories segmenting into each other as character within them tell their own stories. The film in terms of ingesting it over two hours is a massive work, but significantly the result is a series of star studded and elaborate short stories which intercut between each other, all with beginnings that lead to ends but not necessarily all ending as you'd expect them to.

From http://www.slantmagazine.com/assets/film/24952/forbiddenroom.jpg

The stories vary between the melodramatic - an escaped prisoner (Jacques Nolot) becoming the servant of a man (Slimane Dazi) even if he has to hide his chains - to the exceptionally phantasmagoric and bizarre, such as another man developing an evil side to him called Lug Lug because of his obsession with a Janus statue, only for his narrative to end with his doppelganger appearing at an auction. Like a stream-of-consciousness the resulting structural style, intercutting the stories in-between each other depending on the mood of the moment of the whole film, allows for Maddin's feverish imagination to become even more absurd for the sake of it - that vampiric bananas is merely a small anecdote in a much larger work explains what one should expect.

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Technical Detail:

The Forbidden Room is the first Maddin film to fully embrace extensive computer effects which will stand out aesthetically for many. In general the look and tone of the film however is like various different aging film reels being attached together, just as important to what the film is doing as the content is. Like a constantly distorting and decaying image, actors are introduced by their name and their character's in on-screen text, existing behind the veil of faded film stock of various colour tints and digitally added film scratches. Far from the worst of this type of technique, this feels like the creation of people who've watched a lot of older cinema and have learnt the style of these type of films even in their inter-title text fonts to make this effect actually work, giving this film the look of living celluloid as a result. Able to go from bold three-strip colour to monochrome, the result is entirely seamless.

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/forbidden-room-
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Is this the peak of Maddin's style? Not necessarily. Other films before this are just as abstract from his filmography in different ways, such as with Cowards Bend The Knees: The Blue Hands (2003) and its original peek-a-boo machine art installation context and its content. With The Forbidden Room the difference is found in how emphasised and constant the barrage of content is, the collage of narratives a barrage that literally crashes into each other as a character finds a book of climaxes which the viewer witnesses the examples of, including two blindfolded lovers crashing personal hot air blimps into each other. Instead of explaining the blatantly obvious, that this gets the High mark on the rating system, it's better to list some of the more memorable moments in a list since there are so many of them to choose from.

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The fairytale quest of the lumberjack to rescue the damsel, which goes as far as picking up allies with special abilities, only for it to deflate in an anti-climatic ending with feminist leanings. Sparks cameoing, but with singer Russell Mael's face obscured by damage in the celluloid, and composing 'The Final Derrière', about the love and bottoms and scrapping brain matter out of someone's head to cure this fixation. Udo Kier appearing continuously, like many actors, in multiple roles as part of the film's dreamlike tone, actors playing characters in one story and then in another dreamt by a character in their original narrative. Charlotte Rampling in one single story, as Mathieu Amalric's ailing and bed ridden mother, but with her face appearing continually in the flashes of the film's memory. The continuous references to amnesia - from children fighting a trench warfare being told they'll suffer from an ailment where their relatives will forget them to a psychologist literally bringing a woman's inner child back to her on a train - which can be argued to be a key theme of the entire film and its resurrection of lost films. The gleeful perversion that's Maddin trademark, from nudity to eroticism, that manages to get away with being suitable for twelve year olds here in the UK in this particular film and how it presents it. The aswang narrative, of vampires whose footsteps hear from a distance actually mean they're close and could harm you. The simple fact that the film exists even in the context of Maddin's already unique career and has so much left un-discussed in this paragraph awaiting any viewer of The Forbidden Room.

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique; Mindbender; Surreal; Weird

Abstract Tropes: Too many to write down

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Personal Opinion:

An absolute, delirious delight. My only regret is having missed the chance of seeing it on the cinema screen which, on Boxing Day 2015 when it was possible to, would've made a memorable Christmas memory. It's immensely rewarding as well due to how dense it is, apt for multiple rewatches and, in context of Maddin's career especially as the Séance project will be released as its own entity, it offers an exciting new page for his career. Especially as with Keyhole (2011) he switched to digital cameras, this film with his co-director Evan Johnson offers a paradoxical but fascinating tangent of his obsession with cinema's history becoming even more central to his cinema.