If you thought Mulholland Drive was nonsensical or struggle with opaque cinema in general, Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room is not a film for you. Maddin's films are often very challenging experiences, mostly uninterested in any form of narrative storytelling, with The Forbidden Room being no exception. The Forbidden Room's plot, and I use the term loosely, centers around a submarine crew who find themselves trapped deep under water for months, with their cargo becoming increasingly unstable by the day. The crew is terrified by the predicament they find themselves in, and Maddin's film uses this set-up to provide a fever dream of these character's darkest fears, through five interlocking tales. Someone much smarter than me will probably find a deeper meaning to Guy Maddin's latest visual opus, but for me, it really doesn't matter, as once again Maddin has created a film that is cinema in its purest form. A film of blistering emotion, The Forbidden Room has comedy, tragedy, action, lots of absurdity, and love, all of which combine to make the film feel like a love letter to cinema and all it is capable of achieving. While Guy Maddin's films always have comedic and absurdest elements, it has always rubbed me the wrong way that many refer to his film as parody, as there is far too much passion and love for the language and grammar of silent film cinema to be considered anything but a beautiful ode to cinema as a visual medium. While The Forbidden Room is dense, confusing, and unquestionably difficult to follow from a narrative perspective, it hardly matters, as Guy Maddin has created a visual feast, a celebration of the art-form of cinema, most-notably pre-code and the silent era. That being said, The Forbidden Room can and should be appreciated as more than just a visual feast, as the film does offer moments of powerful emotional resonance, buried in its complex, opaque stories. Visually one of the most impressive and fascinating films of the year, The Forbidden Room is guaranteed to be pretty much like nothing you've ever seen before, unless you've seen his other films, delivering another singular vision from Guy Maddin that is campy for sure at times, but also impressively assured in its execution.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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