The Forbidden Room

Film festivals are a peculiar movie-going experience. While the biggies like Sundance and Toronto take a secret sort of pride in discovering the next big thing, their ongoing mission remains to introduce films that would never play in a multiplex....and the vast majority of those films never do. For every Blair Witch Project* there are hundreds of titles that probably never see the silver screen again.

And then there are others that seem made expressly for film festival crowds; purposefully bizarre, intentionally obtuse and supremely cocky in their quirkiness, they exist as a nothing more than giant middle finger to the cinematic establishment, movies like Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room (2015), which is best described as turning Andy Warhol loose into the Turner Classic Movies archive. The result is an absurd psychedelic jukebox set in an alternate silent cinema universe of dreams within dreams within dreams.

The first trip down the rabbit hole leads to the story of a submarine crew running low on air and prevented from returning to the surface by a cargo of pressurized explosive jelly. Just as things appear hopeless, a woodsman enters the ship from outside, covered in seaweed and spitting saltwater. How he got there is the first of many nested stories that shuffle from one tangent to another involving kidnappings, volcanoes, psychotherapy and murder.

Diving headfirst into the digital domain, Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson layer on AfterEffects filters with reckless abandon, turning the film into an organic piece of pop art; an endless loop of Wes Anderson-style imagery set ablaze with color, texture and sound. But it all winds up being too much of a good thing as the striking style eventually deadens the impact of Maddin's intricate story structure. The film never lets up visually or narratively. Vampire bananas, skeleton women, booty-obsessed lobotomies and dream sequences told from the point of view of moustache clippings, The Forbidden Room forces you to drink it all in or vomit it up.

Kino Lorber's Blu-ray makes for an excellent showcase of Maddin's digitally manipulated imagery. And his commentary helps make sense of the more obscure cinematic references, along with a booklet of essays and some extra ecto-loops pulled from the film and best viewed under the influence of controlled substances.