The Forbidden Room

In 2012, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson collaborated on an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre called Seances, which saw them shoot a short film each day in a bid to invoke the spirits of lost or forgotten films. The playful nostalgia that informed that project is very much in evidence in this amalgam of 17 mini-sagas and a slew of fragments and digressions. Centring on bathers, submariners, lumberjacks, flower girls, charlatans, vampires and scheming skeletal maidens, the narratives are filled with familiar faces like Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Maria de Madeiros, Geraldine Chaplin and Charlotte Rampling. Once again, Maddin draws his inspiration from cinema's transitional phase between silent and sound, and he is abetted wonderfully by production designer Galen Johnson and cinematographer Stéphanie Weber-Biron. But kudos should really go to the effects team that gives the digital imagery an atmospherically antiquated feel and to editor John Gurdebeke, who links the vignettes, pastiches and asides with a mesmerising dream logic that makes it easy to overlook the odd misfire or moment of self-indulgence.