Popular reviews

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 1

  Has Guy Maddin been taking absurdist comedy lessons from Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and their Adult Swim team for the last four years, or..?

  A brilliant, hilarious and utterly batshit-yet-respectful-and-affectionate parody of a variety of genres/subgenres & cinematic eras that Maddin so obviously adores. Here, you can feel, very deeply, his love of film.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 1

  Welcome to The Forbidden Room, an exhilarating slipstream of two-strip technicolor havoc that feels like an exquisite corpse assembled from every leftover idea that filmmaker Guy Maddin has ever had. A dense quilt of nested scenes that were allegedly pulled from the cinema’s great abandoned films, The Forbidden Room never proves that Maddin is reanimating “real” lost projects, but how real can a film be if it was never shot?

  FULL REVIEW ON TIME OUT: www.timeout.com/us/film/the-forbidden-room

  (i already regret not going with 5... we don't do 1/2 stars)

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 4

  80/100

  "Be careful about passing gas when you're in the bathtub. It just doesn't go away!"

  Guy Maddin's Journey to the Center of the Cinema. Volcanoes and wolves and flames and clouds woven through a fossilized digital presentation of a celluloid dreamscape. Various scenarios lead to rituals, tangents, expressions, and grand displays of feeling. Watching this is like discovering a nesting doll in the middle of a rabbit hole which happens to all be occuring in a dream that you're having while you're passed out on the floor of a local Taco Bell. Exquisite yet exhausting cinema that reaches as far down as it possibly can, only to burst into thousands of crumbling pieces as its cinematic submarine rises to the surface. Flapjacks!

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  Review by Ben Reiss ★★★★★ 12

  Of course Udo Kier is in this!

  “Hey Udo I’m making a movie it’s weird as-    

  “I’m in!!!”

  All joking aside, The Forbidden Room is weird as shit. It’s only my second Guy Maddin film after Careful and I suspect that starting with these two is kind of like getting into David Lynch by watching Eraserhead and then skipping straight to Inland Empire. It’s a mess. It’s incoherent. It’s the movie equivalent of opening your fridge, pulling out 18 random things that have all expired, putting them in a pot together, and then microwaving the pot. And of course, I LOVED it.

  Let’s start at the beginning (not that that will do us much good). We begin the film…

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  Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★★½ 1

  [9]

  My capsule review from my TIFF Wavelengths coverage for MUBI:

  If The Forbidden Room represents Maddin’s most substantial triumph since The Heart of the World, this could be because the new film is both an inversion and an elaboration on the earlier film’s methods. Where Maddin took a single story (a vaguely Soviet apocalyptic sci-fi lark crisscrossed with a fraternal love triangle) in Heart and condensed it through split-second montage, propulsive music, and exhortative title cards, The Forbidden Room ambles and digresses. Where Godard told us that his Weekend (1968) was “a film adrift in the cosmos,” The Forbidden Room is a film lost inside itself, a mise-en-abyme nightmare of discursive misdirection. Whereas earlier Maddin films have been perhaps…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★ 8

  Wormholes of absurdism. Layers upon layers of abstraction. The Forbidden Room was my first journey into the zonked out, chimerical mind of Guy Maddin—a supreme exhibition in color and design, hypogenic visuals, risible (whether intentional or not) dialogue and nesting doll narrative style—the film combines avant-garde surrealism with silent film techniques and experimental montage, lighting and editing styles to form a nearly-incomprehensible, yet imposingly bizarre piece of fantastical cinema that defies traditional definition or dissection. There were moments that I really enjoyed like the bookending (and occasionally recurring) ‘bathtub man’ bits, the Udo Kier derrière song and dance number and a few other random instances of comedic or oddly dramatic mania. Unfortunately, as a whole, I couldn’t really get into this…

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  Review by Kirai ★★★★★ 5

  The Forbidden Room is a neverending surrealist spectacle of insanity from start to finish. Every single shot is so textured, so crammed with ideas and idiosyncrasies it's unthinkable how Maddin keeps up the pace for 2 hours. It is impossible to overstate just how many unlike-anything-you-have-seen scenes this film has. There isn't even one forgettable frame. Like a modern digital silent film in colour, The Forbidden Room's style is so singular, you will forget how regular films look by the end of it. A must-see just for its post-production visual experimentation.

  From the strange old man opening the film with a tutorial on how to take a bath to the bone surgeon tortured by the women skeletons of The skull-faced…

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  Review by preston ★★★★★

  Guy 'Madman' Maddin, dreaming his molten dreams like that wrathful old volcano. (But who's Evan Johnson?) Unmoored excitements of a stream-of-consciousness trailer reel, multiple-distilled into doublings, rituals, murders, obsessions. "A wife's water, saved for science." Baroque shards of cinephile sense-memories, suggestive colour-tones, half-remembered splinters of familiar narratives, obloquious irruptions of humour. Our collective movie dream-domain tinted, kneaded, twisted, cheated, alchemised, fragments of the lost-and-rotten cheekily restored, once detritus, now this brilliant windbag's mad phantasmagoria of pulchritudinous putrescence. How do I know this? Ha! People have told me, that's how!

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  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★★ 7

  The films of Guy Maddin are an interesting case study for they expose a certain sort of abstractness that breaks as many rules as possible to express creative freedom. You can watch a film like My Winnipeg, a surrealist documentary putting together a sort metafiction about Winnipeg which similarly is Maddin's own autobiography. The Forbidden Room showcases more of his unique talent and leaves behind some sort of flavour which can't be put perfectly into words, for it's truly something unlike whatever else you'll find.

  What we seem to be presented in here is some form of experiment that breaks away from narrative in order to present several stories stacked on top of each other or inside one another, it's…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½ 1

  "Be careful when you're passing gas in the bathtub...it doesn't just go away!"

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  Review by Luke McCarthy 6

  "The film’s structure (a term used very loosely here) is built upon digressions, beginning with one seemingly random narrative thread, only to transport us into the next through the most tangential means possible (this is taken to its hilarious extremes when the mustache of a dead man acts as the catalyst for the next story Maddin has to offer). This stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling continues throughout the rest of the film, Maddin managing to weave a bizarrely coherent cinematic labyrinth in the process, the film so full of ideas that it’s never given the time to collapse under its own weight. The way in which Maddin seems to jump between each barely connected narrative thread so freely is one of the film’s defining features; at times, it feels like a series of filmic movements, snippets of half-remembered stories which emphasize emotions over linearity. "

  My rambling review of 2015's best films found here.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 13

  "Dream the molten dream of justice!"

  Psychedelic nonsense at least, psychological artistry at best. By turns unsettling and hilarious, but always thoroughly captivating and above all intimately personal and singular.

  A comic nightmare had by the mustache of a dead father on his return back from his happier afterlife to bid his third final farewell. Shoot your inner child and re-break your bones to make yourself new again. Wear your dead father's mustache because it makes your mother happy.

  Structured like a nesting doll, but each layer is the same size and they don't fit together except by occupying the exact same time-space coordinates. A dream within a story within a flashback within an anecdote within some utter pretentious garbage…