Film Details

“I’ve never taken LSD and wandered around a film archive, but I imagine the experience might be similar to The Forbidden Room.” So writes Jordan Hoffman in The Guardian about the crazy new feature by Canuck cinephiliac Guy Maddin (The Heart of the World, My Winnipeg). Maddin’s latest assault on sense and the senses is a compendium of absurdist mini-melodramas inspired by movies of the late-silent, early-sound era, and rendered in distressed visuals using the primitive, archaic techniques of that bygone time. (Maddin’s movies seem more “exhumed” than “released.”) The Forbidden Room treats viewers to a feverish, stream-of-consciousness series of nested narratives: a trapped submarine crew is running out of oxygen; a woodsman tries to rescue a kidnapped young woman; a tropical volcano hungers for a human sacrifice; a man undergoes a lobotomy to curb his butt-pinching proclivities; and more! This droll, funny, scary, strange work also has a dream supporting cast: Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier, Maria de Medeiros, and Charlotte Rampling, among others. “For cinephiles and aficionados of the singular, The Forbidden Room represents a very particular kind of feast.” –The Hollywood Reporter.