The Forbidden Room (2015)

It's the kind of film that art house film students dream of. In fact visually it looks very much like an art house film students dream! There's text all over the screen, bits of narration and a truly bizarre story. It's pretty original, it's funny (I think intentionally) and it's nuts. Totally nuts!! Sadly a bit too nuts, good but not great. It sometimes feels like a silent film, with words appearing to help the narrative... but with sound. Some of it struggles and needs some patience, but by enlarge it's fantastic, in every sense of the word. The screen pulses and throbs with energy, it's beautifully crafted. Stories intermingle, twist, plots within plots, within dreams. My one criticism is it's too long, not by a lot, but it would benefit from losing a good 20 minutes. A minor quibble.

This film is not entertainment. It is so strange, I find it psychotic. Nothing in it, or the multitude of sub-stories strung together from beginning to end, have meaning. No characters are likable, comprehensive or sane.I purchased this film based upon reviews as a "masterpiece". They lied.

I realize that a lot of people are going to be put off by the abstract, artistic nature of this film. But what it lacks in cohesion, it more than makes up for in style - similar to poetry, this film is very expressive and doesn't follow any particular norms for film making. It's very visually striking, and for me this was a large part of the enjoyment. Although it has references to films from the silent film era, this film doesn't necessarily keep to a specific style. At times it is sensual and erotic, at other times it's violent and shocking. I believe the intent was to adhere to a certain randomness in both the events portrayed, as well as the tone and visual style; this makes the film follow a seemingly arbitrary path. To me it was visually beautiful and compelling, and I never lost interest. I was impressed by how ambitious it was, with a huge variety of scenes, actors, events. Obviously, the film is very nonlinear and I think the best way to enjoy it is with the expectation of a visual and thematic journey, a series of emotional and artistic events strung loosely together to form a dreamlike storyline.

Canadian director Guy Maddin may be one of cinema's foremost practitioners of arty-fartiness, but he's certainly attracted some big names to appear in 'The Forbidden Room': Louis Negin (a Maddin regular), Roy Dupuis, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier... I wonder how many of them understood the film? I certainly didn't, but then, I'm not sure Maddin is terribly bothered what the audience think.The plot, such as it is, features a crew on a doomed submarine who are suddenly joined by a lumberjack. The question of how the lumberjack got on the submarine is never answered; instead he begins telling his story, which starts with a beautiful woman being kidnapped by a finger-snappin', bladder-beatin' tribe of cavemen and grows, in incomprehensible fashion, to include a man who murders his butler to cover up his own failure to remember his wife's birthday; an aviatrix who finds herself accused of squidnapping, and two animated models that are meant to represent talking bananas but which wouldn't look out of place in those smutty 'Flesh Gordon' films.Substance, though, is not important to Maddin: it's all about style. And my word, does that style make this film a tough watch. Maddin has apparently gone for a 1940s movie serial look and while that implies a certain period charm (indeed, the underwater shots of the submarine have a pleasingly cheap and retro look), we also get bleached colour, flickering images and scratchy sound that, coupled with the fact most shots last no longer than 3-4 seconds and even then the bloody camera doesn't stay still, make it difficult for the eye to focus on anything.To sum up, the loose and at times humorous storyline does make this an interesting watch. But the production values mean I wouldn't want to put myself through it again!