Guy Maddin’s typically bewildering latest has its creative roots in the 2010 film-loop installation Hauntings, which grew into the internet Seances project; a series of short films nominally inspired by lost titles of the 20s and 30s. Created in conjunction with Evan Johnson (who gets a co-director credit), The Forbidden Room is a cinematic Russian doll of tales within tales – tales of the snow and the cave; of submarines laden with Wages of Fear-style unstable blasting jelly; of doppelgängers, demons and two-faced gods; of volcanic sacrifices and monstrous couplings; of brain surgery, memory and madness. The heavily post-produced images jump from faux-scratchy black and white to the damaged hues of two-strip Technicolor, silent movie intertitles overlapping with sound-era dialogue in a postmodern meringue of pulp cliche as the screen pulsates like infernal internal organs, or bubbles and mutates like melting celluloid jammed in a hot projector. The wraparound framing device finds Louis Negin delivering a hilarious John Ashbery-scripted instructional lecture on “how to take a bath”, and most of the action seems to take place down the plughole. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost,” says the film’s biblical epigraph, and at times Maddin seems to have taken that literally; for all its carnivalesque pleasures, this would have benefited from some judicious trimming (it’s reportedly lost several minutes since its Sundance premiere and could happily shed more).
Meanwhile, the star-studded cast (which includes Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Mathieu Amalric and many, many more) militates against the outsider weirdness of, say, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, a film that seemed as genuinely otherworldly as Eraserhead. The result is riotous, ridiculous and a little frustrating, but there’s more than enough Maddin magic to dazzle and befuddle those happy to make this fearsome journey without a compass.
