Guy Maddin has always been an inveterate film classicist, recreating the textures and styles of silent-era films with the loving care of a fetishist, and while he’s done exactly that with The Forbidden Room, he’s done it in such a way that the result feels strikingly new. Born out of a new media project he shot at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Maddin and his collaborators took titles of 17 lost films of the silent era, imagined what they might have been like, shot them and threw them into a narrative blender to create The Forbidden Room. The result is a hallucinatory mélange of images, stories, and styles, all rendered in the most unique visual aesthetic seen on film in quite some time.
Maddin, shooting digitally for the first time, has used technology to simulate the inadvertent effects of aging on film, including nitrate decay, warping, and scratching. But whereas real film can only warp so much and still fit through a projector, Maddin’s digital effects can be turned up to 11, pushing this unique visual style further than it ever could go if created organically. Images flicker and pulse, distend themselves across the screen intercut with copious and hilarious titles – usually with exclamation points!!
If the visual style wasn’t strange enough, the story, such as it is, is even stranger. The film opens with a louche man named Marv in a shiny robe teaching us “How to Take a Bath,” in a portion written by poet John Ashbery prompted only by that title. From there, the audience is whisked away to a submarine, where the frightened crew encounters a lumberjack, who has no idea how he got there, since he was last trying to rescue a girl from a cave of bandits deep in the forest. The film goes on in this manner cutting between nested narratives that are united in their fevered pitch, utter strangeness, and 1920s approach to storytelling. It’s likely impossible to keep up with the chaotic events on screen as new stories and settings wash over the audience like wave after wave. But even without a narrative foothold for the audience, it’s tremendously entertaining and always funny, as we’re treated to volcano sacrifices, exploding brains, bandit initiation rituals, and more. Maddin is clearly having fun with the material, but he never goes for cheap gags or irony, he has too deep a love for the material; his actors get laughs by playing it straight amidst incredible strangeness.
The Forbidden Room is likely too esoteric for many, but for cinephiles or anyone daring enough to keep up with its breakneck pace, it’s a delirious feast for the senses and truly a one-of-a-kind experience.
