An Avalanche of Surreal Stories: Inside The Forbidden Room
If you thought movies had to make linear sense, you haven’t seen The Forbidden Room. Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson dared to toss storytelling rules out the window in 2015, delivering a brain-bending, visually chaotic ride that’s as much a love letter to old films as it is an experiment in cinematic artificiality. Right from the jump, you’re on a submarine where the crew is chewing pancakes to survive. That’s just the first bizarre scene—blink, and suddenly a mysterious woodsman bursts in, fleeing crazed cave dwellers. Before you know it, one of his stories unrolls, then another, like Russian nesting dolls set loose by a mischievous director.
No vignette feels predictable. One minute it’s amnesia or vampiric bananas, the next it’s women made of skeletons plotting surreal escapes. The movie leaps from horror to fantasy to dark comedy in a single breath. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings, the narrative cracks wide open, and you tumble into another stranger world. Maddin and Johnson tap into the dreamlike logic of early silent films—think flickering reels, melodramatic gestures, colors that burst from grainy darkness. Their homage is no staid museum piece; it’s noisy, sometimes disorienting, packed with energy that feels one part Italo Calvino, one part Sergei Eisenstein, and all the chaos of a feverish kid’s imagination.
Artificiality as Art: Paying Tribute, Breaking Boundaries
Maddin’s work has always walked the line between nostalgia and subversion, but with Johnson’s co-direction, the artificiality in The Forbidden Room goes amplified. The team doesn’t pretend anything is real; sets look staged, lighting is theatrical, the editing is jagged on purpose. That artificial look isn’t just a retro throwback—it’s woven right into how the movie tells its tangled tales. Visual layers overlap; you see scratches, chemical burns, images melting and reforming mid-scene. Rather than pull you out, these effects shove you deeper, making every segment feel part nightmare, part old-school film relic found in a forgotten attic.
The cast—including Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Udo Kier, Louis Negin, plus Maddin’s regular collaborators—are in on the game. They play up the melodrama, mug for the camera, and lean shamelessly into the weirdness. The result manages to be haunting, ludicrous, and touching all at once.
What cements The Forbidden Room as a standout is its absolute commitment to breaking down how films work—the way stories can nest inside stories, how visuals can switch from one century to the next, and how every layer of artifice can pull you in further. If you judge movies by how unpredictable and inventive they get, Maddin and Johnson’s 2015 creation isn’t just avant-garde—it’s a dizzying deep dive into what cinema could be when no one settles for ordinary.