Critics reviews

At first I thought this ripe-rot-suffused pastiche of serial, Expressionist, and Doris Wishman stylizations was on the drawn-out side, but on considering its spectacular climactic payoff and more, I think I'd like to see the three-hour version of which I've heard tell.

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.

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.

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.

There is a stirring in the balls of this movie, says Guy Maddin by way of describing The Forbidden Room, a deliriously brilliant comedy that's potentially readable – among many other things – as a metaphor for orgasm. After all, it begins in a damp submarine compartment crammed with male seamen yearning to breathe free, proceeds through a series of increasingly heightened dramatic interactions and ends with a literal series of 'climaxes', narratological money shots connoting euphoric release.

Shrinking, blotching, and clarifying on a dime, the protoplasmic nature of Johnson and Maddin's digitally mediated imagery is of a piece with The Forbidden Room's amnesiac framing device, allowing for the abrogated mini-narratives to crumble and dissolve into one another like novellas with pages ripped out.

Although the film was made digitally, Maddin and Johnson managed to imbue it with the lushness and texture of the Maddin's work of old, the saturated colours and artificial exoticism reminiscent of Careful (1992) in particular... Once the physical discomfort of the [IMAX] screening was safely past, however, what remained branded upon the brain was The Forbidden Room's ecstatic pleasures.

The benefits of weathering Maddin and Johnson's storm are considerable. Once acclimated to the notion that no established thread will ever satisfyingly be tied up in the end, you're freed to exult in the momentary—and to register the gravity behind such a structural assertion, that all that's lost can only be briefly summoned or glimpsed or guessed at before it fades back away.

[Maddin isn't] so much a filmmaker of themes as he is an artist who uses film as an outlet and a container for his restless, fevered imagination – like an abstract expressionist, only instead of dripping paintbrushes he has the collective dream of cinema, the memories, moods, and postures of silent movies and melodrama. He throws everything at you, and in The Forbidden Room, he throws it all faster than before, and for longer than before. You're shellshocked by the time you get out.

Picking up the frayed strands of silent-era films and shocking them back to life, The Forbidden Roomis a hallucinatory and perverse love letter to cinema history and an exploration of the medium's boundless possibilities. With a cast featuring Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, and Geraldine Chaplin, the film unfolds in a string of explosive and hilarious stories woven together by dreams, sex, love, fantasy, and murder—Guy's favorite obsessions.

The result is certainly full of "boggling puzzlements", but also of ideas and invention, of errant eros and unfathomable (if not strictly bottomless) hilarity... 'Cathartic' barely begins to cover this film's effect on the viewer, but Maddin and Evans have crafted an aqueous oddity that is also a pure, bubbly joy.

The surrealist result plays to Maddin's strengths as a master of densely aestheticized short films, as he crafts a lucid expression of his own feverish perspective on the movies that shaped his art. Having assembled plots for the various shorts from the AFI's descriptions of lost films, Maddin and Johnson depict the death dream of cinema itself, and as such, a rich vein of history runs through the images.