Film Forum

Guy Maddin, a master of the bizarre (MY WINNIPEG, BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!) and co-director Evan Johnson, inspired by early sound films from the 1920s, conjure a hallucinatory, deep-sea fantasia. A woodsman inexplicably appears aboard a submarine, trapped under water for months, carrying mysterious cargo. As the terrified crew make their way through the corridors of the doomed vessel, they voyage into the origins of their darkest fears. Innovatively shot using techniques that reinvent early cinema, this “exhilarating slipstream of two-strip Technicolor” (David Ehrlich, Time Out New York) includes cameos by Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, a lobotomized Udo Kier, an elevator-dwelling Mathieu Amalric, and poet John Ashbery – who offers some helpful bathing tips. 

CANADA • 2015 • APPROX. 120 MINS. • KINO LORBER

Reviews

“A phantasmagoria. A post-Freudian horror comedy.”
– Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“CRITICS’ PICK. You have no excuse not to sip from the intoxicating fountain that is (this) strange and wondrous work.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“Too much is just right in THE FORBIDDEN ROOM, the movie-mad filmmaker’s latest feat of phantasmagorical cinema. An immersive plunge into the roiling waters of cinema’s history and its unconscious. A cauldron bubbling over with highly spices visual and narrative tropes. A marvel. A genuinely experimental experience, at once an imagistic neo-‘happening,’ a cornucopian overflowing of a story and a materialist rhapsody on the textures of antique film stock.”
– Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

“(An) hilariously demented, intellectually rigorous invocation of early cinema’s esoteric tropes and aesthetics that seems to have been pulled through another dimension.”
– Aaron Hillis, Village Voice

“A wild, demented cinephiliac feast”
– The Hollywood Reporter

 “An inventive, audacious, and outright hilarious tour de force whatzit.”
– Cinema Scope

“Has more ideas in ten minutes than most filmmakers have in their entire oeuvres.”
– Sight + Sound

 “Gorgeous. I’ve never taken LSD and wandered around a film archive, but I imagine the experience might be similar to THE FORBIDDEN ROOM.”
– Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian (UK)

“A crowning masterpiece.”
– Cinema Scope