The Forbidden Room

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is Guy Maddin’s ultimate epic phantasmagoria.
Honoring classic cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this Russian nesting
doll of a film begins (after a prologue on how to take a bath) with the crew of a
doomed submarine chewing flapjacks in a desperate attempt to breathe the
oxygen within.
Suddenly, impossibly, a lost woodsman wanders into their company and tells his
tale of escaping from a fearsome clan of cave dwellers. From here, Maddin and
co-director Evan Johnson take us high into the air, around the world, and into
dreamscapes, spinning tales of amnesia, captivity, deception and murder,
skeleton women and vampire bananas. Playing like some glorious meeting
between Italo Calvino, Sergei Eisenstein and a perverted six year-old child, THE
FORBIDDEN ROOM is Maddin's grand ode to lost cinema. Created with the help
of master poet John Ashbery, the film features Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier,
Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin,
Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Adèle Haenel, Amira Casar & Elina
Löwensohn as a cavalcade of misfits, thieves and lovers, all joined in the joyful
delirium of the kaleidoscopic viewing experience.