The Forbidden Room
Synopsis
A submarine crew, a feared pack of forest bandits, a famous surgeon, and a battalion of child soldiers all get more than they bargained for as they wend their way toward progressive ideas on life and love.
Our take
One of cinema’s great eccentrics, Guy Maddin takes the relics of film history to peaks of delirium in The Forbidden Room, co-directed with Evan Johnson. Bizarre cinematic dreamscapes unfurl before our eyes, as interwoven stories jostle up against each other, playing out like a cinephile’s acid trip.
Whereas Cemetery of Splendour moves at a slow, fittingly oneiric pace, Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room wildly careens from one episodic fragment of its re-imagined film history to another. Co-directed with one of Maddin’s former students, Evan Johnson, The Forbidden Room was one of the most unique, lively, and experimental titles screened at the AFF.
Saige Walton
December 16, 2015
As always in Maddin films, the presiding spirit is camp and crypto-gay, a colouring underlined by the presence of such actors as Udo Kier. The storylines, however, emphasise loss, bereavement, amnesia and injury, echoing the fate of the original lost films themselves. The melodramatic fragments here have little or no emotional kick, but the film as a whole delivers a febrile melancholia with gusto.
Tony Rayns
December 10, 2015
It’s very much the kind of mind-melting opus we’ve come to expect from Canadian director Guy Maddin, whose collaboration with Evan Johnson here deserves recognition as one of the most extravagantly bizarre films ever made.
Tim Robey
December 10, 2015
Related films
The Saddest Music in the World
Guy Maddin, 2003
The Heart of the World
Guy Maddin, 2000
My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin, 2007
Keyhole
Guy Maddin, 2011
Love Torn in a Dream
Raúl Ruiz, 2000
City of Pirates
Raúl Ruiz, 1983
Tales from the Gimli Hospital
Guy Maddin, 1988
Three Crowns of the Sailor
Raúl Ruiz, 1983
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Wes Anderson, 2004
Jauja
Lisandro Alonso, 2014