The Forbidden Room

There's no proper way to convey the sheer, cinematic lunacy of "The Forbidden Room," the latest film from Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson. Like the former's previous works, which include "Brand Upon the Brain!" and "The Saddest Music in the World," it's wildly inventive, hilariously bizarre and gorgeous to behold. Yet, even being familiar with Maddin's filmography isn't enough to prepare you for the phantasmagoric brilliance of this Canadian auteur's magnum opus: A hallucinatory hybrid of silent-film nostalgia and avant-garde surrealism that's unlike anything you've ever seen.

An uproariously funny prelude, "How to Take a Bath," inspired by a lost 1937 instructional film written by John Ashberry, sets the stage for a series of kooky vignettes that unfold over the course of the picture. This short abruptly fades out, transitioning to a group of men on board a submarine known as the S.S. Plunger. Due to a decreasing lack of oxygen, the shipmates eat nothing but flapjacks, based on the assumption that the air pockets in said pancakes might help them survive for "twice as long." Making matters even more absurd, they happen to be stuck with 500 pounds of depressurized "blasting jelly" that will explode if the vessel rises any higher above their current sea level.

Suddenly, as an accompanying title card states, "a never-before-seen woodsman (Roy Dupuis) mysteriously appears aboard ship." (The film is that feverishly silly.) Once the crew asks where he's come from, the narrative delves into his personal backstory, consisting of his valiant efforts to rescue the love of his life, Margot (Clara Furey) who was kidnapped by a tribe of cavemen known as the Red Wolves. Eventually, the film dives into one of Margot's flashbacks, only to devolve into another flashback, and this cycle continues to a dizzying extent throughout the course of two exhilaratingly manic hours.

"The Forbidden Room" audaciously subverts mainstream conventions not just with its seemingly anarchic structure, but through its vividly deranged imagination. Two characters are transformed into a pair of "Aswang bananas" that speak in demonic tongues. There's a musical montage set to a song titled, "The Final Derri�re" (performed by the '80s new wave band, Sparks), in which Udo Kier is lobotomized numerous times as an attempt to remove any lustful thoughts of pinching women's buttocks. An extensively elaborate dream sequence plays out from the perspective of a volcano. A man with tentacles dangling from his mouth runs for his life as a title card exclaims, "Squid Theft!" And this is merely a fraction of the insanity that occurs.

In addition to its gleefully demented subject matter, the film is a remarkable technical achievement. Despite being shot on digital video, Johnson was able to use several postproduction effects to compose a visual style for "The Forbidden Room" that gives off a celluloid texture. Images bubble and melt as if they're being projected from a reel of film on the verge of catching fire, appropriately capturing the aesthetic qualities of a worn out print. The schizophrenic editing also contributes to the film's stylized homages to cinema's past, erratically alternating between formal transitions and jittery, rapid-fire cuts.

What this chaotic concoction of idiosyncratic tangents adds up to is, ultimately, up to interpretation. Aspects of Maddin's personal life are interspersed throughout the film; one segment that centers on the ghost of a father who continually disrupts the grieving processes of his wife and son stems from the director still learning to cope with the loss of his own father at a young age. During a Q&A that followed the press screening I attended at the New York Film Festival, Maddin also revealed that several of these stories serve as a "public apology" for how women are consistently mistreated by their imposing male counterparts within our patriarchal society.

Regardless of whether you're capable of deconstructing every little detail of "The Forbidden Room," or remain completely mystified by it, there's no denying that it's a work of vast ambition. Bound to polarize viewers with its web of intertwining narratives and its warped sense of humor, Maddin and Johnson have, nonetheless, crafted an uncompromisingly bold work of art; a wet dream for cinephiles that's as mind-bogglingly complex as it is viscerally alive. In other words, it's one of the best films of the year.