THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Guy Maddin has struck again! In his latest work, created in collaboration with Evan Johnson, the installation artist and film avant-gardist, born in 1956 in Winnipeg, Canada, once again sets sail for the stormy seas. Into the shallows of anarchic narration, associative metaphor and unleashed visual design. At once the feverish delirium of a bathtub captain and the nightmarish, mysterious condensation of an adventure film, The Forbidden Room (2015) races breathlessly through the genres. Interlocking stories feign causality, only to lead mischievously into mischief or spread fear and terror with horror motifs. The design is familiar as a citational tapestry of the silent and early film visual style, but the meandering movements of plot and personnel through space and time are profoundly confusing: wasn't the mysterious woodcutter who appears on a submarine in distress deep in the woods looking for his Margo, who has been abducted by the red wolves? Hasn't she just been captured by savages on a volcanic island? What do the two have to do with each other? Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning!