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 The Forbidden Room is a film by Guy Maddin and like most of his films they are just sort of in a category of their own. I was lucky enough to catch that this at Sundance this year and kind of expected it never really get a release anywhere, but it got picked up and should in theory be out sometime soon (or maybe even now), so I'm making this topic made up mostly of what I wrote after Sundance. I’m not going to be able to fully get across what the movie is like but I’m going to try. It is the fever dream that film would have if it were a person. It is a peak into the film afterlife where the souls of lost films end up. The whole thing feels like a living breathing organism made of film. The movie is basically a series of short films based on scripts and ideas found in researching old lost silent movies. The stories all connect but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, that is to say there is always a transition from one story to the next but that transition isn’t always sensible. For example the film opens with a short on “how to take a bath” and that leads to the next submarine related short by zooming into the bathtub. The stories go back and forth between each other, like a Russian doll that's being taken apart and put back together again. Some layers last longer with others with the first three lasting throughout the entire film. The subjects of the films are all over the place with most being pretty ridiculous. There’s the aforementioned submarine one, where the crew suck on pancakes for extra air, a short where a bone doctor is kidnapped by lady skeletons and forced to wear a poison skeleton unitard, a short where a journalist crashes on an island where she has a lesbian tryst with a girl about to sacrificed to a volcano that’s been enraged by the theft of a squid, s a musical interlude about a man who seeks help for his obsessions with derrieres sung by a man with a blurred out face and many more. The shorts are from all over the map but they all have a weird dreamlike, nonsense quality to them. I tend to really like movies that have a fever dream quality to them. Those films are also pretty much all horror films. This is the first movie I’ve seen that has that quality but is more whimsical than scary. There are some weird and horrifying moments in the film, but the absurdity of it all is more often than not played for laughs. Still that fever dream atmosphere is strong, with strange things happening all around that are never explained or justified. We mainly are just expected to take the strange logic and events of these shorts at face value. Things are often presented as if we already know the meaning. It should be mentioned that the film is god damned gorgeous in its strange way. As I mentioned earlier, the movie has an alive feel to it with the images warping and breaking in a way that’s almost hypnotic (the moving poster above is sort of representative of how the film looks most of the time). The movie perfectly captures the look and feel of tattered old films and does interesting and weird things with this aesthetic. There’s one shot in particular, where magma warps into the shape of an old windmill on a hill to get to the next scene. It's simply jaw-dropping. The music goes well with the look, sounding like old movies but constantly twisting and warping. These two things can be seen immediately in the opening credits, a montage of various styles of old credits that are constantly warping and shifting into another style like a bunch of random bits of film spliced together badly and put on the reel. It’s probably the best opening credits since Enter the Void. This isn't going to be for everyone. While there is a narrative to follow along with, it doesn’t always make sense and it is often absurd and nonsensical. Things don’t really link together in any meaningful way and it’s often not clear if anything is going towards anything meaningful. However, if you’ve made it this far and this all sounds good to you, I can’t recommend this movie enough. When I originally wrote the above I could only vaguely describe what the movie looked like but now I have a trailer I can link that will give a much better idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHPid6AC6tM Looking around it seems the movie is out there somewhere but I'm not sure where and when you can see it. I'm not even expecting many replies from this thread, I just want to get the existence of this movie out there. All I can really say is if you get the opportunity to see this, do so. I can't guarantee you'll like it but it will be something that is unlike anything else you've seen.
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Oct 13, 2015 04:48
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I plan on seeing this very soon, as there's no one quite like Guy Maddin.
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Oct 13, 2015 17:35
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I literally just got back from seeing this at the VA Film Festival, thanks for the recommendation OP, I loved this film visually, and the strange warping effects, along with the general aesthetic of the film just held me enraptured throughout. I need some time to digest the whole thing, but I wanted to say thank you for posting about it, I'd probably have never caught it otherwise. The song about butts was a highlight though, for a lot of reasons.
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Nov 9, 2015 05:50
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I'm just happy that my making this topic did actually get someone to see this movie 
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Nov 9, 2015 06:08
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It's coming to a theater near me in December so I'll go see it. The trailer looks awesome, thanks for the recommendation.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:44
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:The song about butts was a highlight though, for a lot of reasons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YQw6KLJGf8
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Nov 9, 2015 22:22
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caligulamprey posted:This was uploaded onto Youtube as a promo, and delivers everything you want in a Sparks music video for a song about asses directed by Guy Maddin (and the other dude): You just made my day. Asses asside, the effect of over the singer in this, and the weird melty transition bit are two of the coolest visuals in the film, the melty transition being something that happens a few times. This is a really douchey, 19-year-old thing to say, but a lot of this film was a very accurate depiction of what some heavier acid trips look and feel like. I dunno how intentional that was but between the entirely non-linear story and structure, the weird melting effects throughout, the difficulty maintaining a grasp on characters and the colors, you can come away with a good idea of what its like to be on a lot of brain altering chemicals.
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Nov 10, 2015 01:39
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I'm so incredibly bummed that I missed this while it was here in Seattle, but if anyone's seen and enjoyed this without, somehow, having seen any other Guy Maddin films then I urge you to fix that ASAP.
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Nov 10, 2015 01:58
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Hey Boston area people: this movie is playing at the Brattle on Saturday so if you get a chance, check it out.
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Jan 20, 2016 15:57
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This movie has also been streaming on Fandor for the last month or two. They have a 14 day free trial. This might be my favorite movie of last year or at least top 3. I've seen a few other Maddin films and while it is unmistakeably his, it also takes his visual experimentation to a whole other level.
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Jan 21, 2016 03:13
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This is one of the rare movies that might play better at home than on the big-screen. Seeing the original, extended cut in the middle of a festival was way too much. We were all ready to go the first time that the stories decompress back to zero and our appreciation of the second set suffered a lot because of how exhausted we were by then. The option of taking a break, hell a Tarantino-style intermission, would no doubt have helped me like this movie more than I did. It only works if you're in the mood to go along with its silliness as it's really just a set of stylish, nonsense stories.
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Jan 23, 2016 02:43
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Viginti posted:This is one of the rare movies that might play better at home than on the big-screen. Seeing the original, extended cut in the middle of a festival was way too much. We were all ready to go the first time that the stories decompress back to zero and our appreciation of the second set suffered a lot because of how exhausted we were by then. The option of taking a break, hell a Tarantino-style intermission, would no doubt have helped me like this movie more than I did. It only works if you're in the mood to go along with its silliness as it's really just a set of stylish, nonsense stories. Huh interesting. Do you know what the difference in cuts is (not sure which version I've seen)? I saw this at a film festival last year and, whilst I enjoyed it, it really was just too long. It was at the section with the murder in the continuous elevator and the ghost dad that I'd really just had enough, and I came out thinking those sceens should have been cut. I was still enjoying it towards the end, particularly the Janus bust segment in between those segments (and The Book of Climaxes), but with most scenes so disconected from one another you lose all sense of structure and it was easy to become a bit fed up when it keeps looping back to old scenes. You could maybe cut back the visual fluff throughout to tighten up the film, but I think that'd be doing the film a disservice. Don't let this come across as too negative, I did enjoy The Forbidden Room. If you liked this you should check out My Winnipeg, which I love. It's less overwhelmingly styalised than this, but has a great dreamlike flow to it, with a spiraling, poetic narration. It's less farsical, but has a more deliberate humor to it. Incidentally, did you know that Winnipeg has ten times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world?
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Jan 24, 2016 08:26
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Saw this hungover as hell at the Brattle on Saturday. Liked it more than Keyhole, though the complaints about it feeling overly long are pretty valid. As with most Guy Maddin films, being hungover and miserable adds a lot to the experience.
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Jan 25, 2016 02:21
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Goatmask posted:Huh interesting. Do you know what the difference in cuts is (not sure which version I've seen)? I saw this at a film festival last year and, whilst I enjoyed it, it really was just too long. It was at the section with the murder in the continuous elevator and the ghost dad that I'd really just had enough, and I came out thinking those sceens should have been cut. I was still enjoying it towards the end, particularly the Janus bust segment in between those segments (and The Book of Climaxes), but with most scenes so disconected from one another you lose all sense of structure and it was easy to become a bit fed up when it keeps looping back to old scenes. You could maybe cut back the visual fluff throughout to tighten up the film, but I think that'd be doing the film a disservice. I don't know the exact details, but it seems like he cut ten-fifteen minutes from the Festival cut before this main release. He did it after watching the film with an audience and feeling how long it was. I don't know if that means he dropped a section or two, or just shortened them all. I can't hurt either way though. Winnipeg was my first Maddin and it is great, i'm also quite partial to 'Saddest Music' so I can dig his style, this was just a bit too much of it in one helping for me.
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Jan 26, 2016 02:14
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Saw it last night. I found it spectacular but have no idea how meticulously structured its supposed to be- the shorts are all strange homages to Guy Madden's favorite old-time genres.I also live and work in Montreal and a few of the actors, like Louis Negan, frequent the Cafe I worked, my partner was put off by it because she kept seeing familiar faces. But still really loved it. It had a James Joycy even Finnegan's Wake kind of feel to me, in the fact that their were thousands of elements of bath-taking scattered among the narratives (submerged under the sea, farting in the bath, sexual fantasies) that I could almost read the film as a long mystical fever dream had by an old drunk man in a bath. Also any Guy Madden fan should get a hold of his published journals, he is a fantastic, intelligent writer.
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Feb 3, 2016 18:06
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This movie is now up on Netflix so if you haven't seen it you no longer have an excuse.
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Apr 1, 2016 06:56
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Oh hell yeah.
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Apr 1, 2016 15:45
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