The Cinematheque

“Like being sloppily slapped by a wet salmon to the point of submission … [An] inventive, audacious, and outright hilarious tour de force whatzit.”

Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope

“Winnipeg original Guy Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson plunge us into celluloid delirium with this mad, multi-narrative maze of phantasmal fables. Maddin has always been driven by a deep-seated love of strange and obscure sub-genres from cinema’s past. This intoxicating tour of weird set pieces—from a trapped submarine crew forced to eat flapjacks to an Expressionist music video featuring a man (Udo Kier) fatally obsessed with women’s backsides—is a paean to movies lost, forgotten, or never made. There’s also an art-film lover’s dream cast: cinema icons, European stars, Quebec’s best actors, and indefatigable Maddin regular Louis Negin. With each new ​‘room’ as depraved, sinful, beautiful, wild, and wondrous as the last, it’s as if The Forbidden Room was designed to give prudish censors a never-ending string of coronaries” (Steve Gravestock, TIFF).

Best Canadian Film
Toronto Film Critics Association (2015)

“The Forbidden Room has more ideas in ten minutes than most filmmakers have in their entire oeuvres; Maddin jumps into the murky waters of lost styles of nutso movie storytelling and delivers back everything he finds.”

Robert Greene, Sight and Sound

“Probably his crowning masterpiece … [An] oneiric epic.”

Blake Williams, Cinema Scope