The Forbidden Room

You don't watch The Forbidden Room, you surrender to it. This is Guy Maddin's first full-length feature since 2011's Keyhole, and it sometimes feels as if every single idea the Canadian auteur has had in the intervening four years has found its way into this amorphous epic. Each bizarre story only leads us to an even stranger one, with the Russian-doll-like structure pulling us ever deeper into a confounding world of damsels in distress, flapjacks, amnesia, fetishes, zombies and hysterical intertitles (“SQUID THEFT!”).

It's an exhausting and overwhelming film to experience, but there's also something exhilarating about its mad energy and boundless invention. It's also an aesthetic wonder to behold, with Maddin's idiosyncratic adoption of early cinema techniques resulting in a near-constant supply of vivid and beautiful images. The films of Guy Maddin are undoubtedly an acquired taste but adventurous and patient viewers will be rewarded with an overload of original ideas, huge belly-laughs, dazzling visuals and an infuriatingly catchy song about buttocks. Who could ask for anything more? [Philip Concannon]