Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room is a tribute to a film that never existed. More accurately, it is a supercut of various fictional films—a stitched-together collage of associative links and vague thematic consistency. From one point of view, the film depicts the collective hallucination of a group of trapped submariners whose oxygen has run so low they are forced to suck the air bubbles from flapjacks. But to apply so literalist an interpretation to the film, even one as absurd as that, is to ignore Maddin’s freewheeling achievement. The surrealist result plays to Maddin’s strengths as a master of densely aestheticized short films, as he crafts a lucid expression of his own feverish perspective on the movies that shaped his art. Having assembled plots for the various shorts from the AFI’s descriptions of lost films, Maddin and Johnson depict the death dream of cinema itself, and as such, a rich vein of history runs through the images.
The film opens with the first of its many quotes, this one from John 6:12, which reads, “When they were filled, he said unto his disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” That sentiment defines Maddin and Johnson’s style, which employs various After Effects tricks to expand analogue, in-camera effects into a kind of total editing. Transitions tend to occur via stretches and collapses of the frame, as if a film strip kept swirling around a bathtub drain. (Tubs feature into the film’s occasionally glimpsed framing device—a hilarious how-to video on taking baths that harks back to 1960s and ‘70s television.) Emulsion effects regularly cause the film’s grain to explode and swallow faces whole, signaling scene breaks, but also mental conditions where fugue states send characters deep within the recesses of their minds to face fears and desires.
The Forbidden Room’s color palette is split between the reds and greens of primitive, two-strip Technicolor, while added scratches and bends in the “stock,” as well as pops and crackles in the soundtrack, evoke the material wear of old films even as Maddin moves into digital. With its murky lighting and faded hues, The Forbidden Room looks like a print shown on early color TV, and it’s fitting that it should traverse the kind of genres that would play late at night in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Cheesy hero tales can be seen in the form of noble lumberjacks seeking to rescue a woman from a feral group of bandits, while elsewhere one can find everything from bottle-episode naval thriller to shoestring-budget film noir to 1930s melodrama. Vampires, skeletons, thieves, loincloth-clad women and more enact stories of murder, romance and psychodrama.
Perhaps the most consistent link between these myriad references and scenarios is the film’s esoteric sense of humor. One entire segment is devoted to a kind of cabaret music video devoted to rear ends, a sequence cut up into images of a leering Udo Kier, the rumps he cannot stop ogling, and, to throw people for a loop, interactions with a doctor who lobotomizes the man to cure his lust. Elsewhere, Mathieu Amalric plays a neurotic husband who attempts to please his bored wife for her birthday by faking a theft of the collectibles he dotes upon more than her, a plan of such wracked logic it ends with a murder to complete the illusion. Even throwaway gags like the sight of tires and tapioca sacrificed to a volcano, thus mocking the arbitrariness of tossing virgins in there, keep pace with the sprinting movement of the film’s constant swirl.
But if the film can sometimes seem like one dense leg-pull, it also uses its oneiric structure to delve into direct confrontations with turbulent emotions with clarity. One sequence set aboard a train of mental patients locked in cages doubles as a kind of Freudian freakshow rendition of Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, wherein the Marlene Dietrich figure is cornered by a randy psychiatrist and radiates fatigue at such endless solicitation, and the fear of incessant harassment. Longing punctuates segments throughout, culminating in a couple reduced to the quintessence of larger-than-life romance when the man breathlessly whispers “I found you” and they kiss as an atomic bomb explodes in the horizon. The structure of The Forbidden Room has been likened to matryoshka dolls forever being opened to reveal the next figure snuggled within. Yet that is too straightforward a comparison and does not account for how the film’s elements are all at once logically ordered yet bewildering in action. It’s more like cracking open an egg only for a fully grown bird to fly out. Then, for good measure, it craps on your head.
