The Forbidden Room (2015)

Canadian director Guy Maddin may be one of cinema's foremost practitioners of arty-fartiness, but he's certainly attracted some big names to appear in 'The Forbidden Room': Louis Negin (a Maddin regular), Roy Dupuis, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier... I wonder how many of them understood the film? I certainly didn't, but then, I'm not sure Maddin is terribly bothered what the audience think.

The plot, such as it is, features a crew on a doomed submarine who are suddenly joined by a lumberjack. The question of how the lumberjack got on the submarine is never answered; instead he begins telling his story, which starts with a beautiful woman being kidnapped by a finger-snappin', bladder-beatin' tribe of cavemen and grows, in incomprehensible fashion, to include a man who murders his butler to cover up his own failure to remember his wife's birthday; an aviatrix who finds herself accused of squidnapping, and two animated models that are meant to represent talking bananas but which wouldn't look out of place in those smutty 'Flesh Gordon' films.

Substance, though, is not important to Maddin: it's all about style. And my word, does that style make this film a tough watch. Maddin has apparently gone for a 1940s movie serial look and while that implies a certain period charm (indeed, the underwater shots of the submarine have a pleasingly cheap and retro look), we also get bleached colour, flickering images and scratchy sound that, coupled with the fact most shots last no longer than 3-4 seconds and even then the bloody camera doesn't stay still, make it difficult for the eye to focus on anything.

To sum up, the loose and at times humorous storyline does make this an interesting watch. But the production values mean I wouldn't want to put myself through it again!