In a few special cases during its premiere run in 2007, Brand Upon the Brain! was exhibited as the kind of grand spectacle common to regal movie palaces in the silent era: an entire orchestra performed Jason Staczek’s screeching and clashing score, a crew of Foley artists were on hand to provide sound effects, and guest celebrities served up on-the-spot narration. Shorn of these live accoutrements, it is hard to gauge the extent to which Maddin’s most elaborate act of cinematic self-mythology preserves its live impact, but what does remain is so overripe with emotion and intrigue that it would be trifling to deem it a letdown. Crowded with sensationalistic intertitles that evoke vintage movie advertising language and organized in twelve chapters (each one more mired in dream logic than the last), Maddin’s film focuses on a fictionalized version of himself returning after three decades to an abandoned island home in frigid Canadian waters, the site of traumatic childhood memories that are then revived, no thanks to the incantatory narration of Isabella Rossellini, during his troubling sojourn at the house. Consider Brand Upon the Brain! the skeleton key to Maddin’s oeuvre: it is so steeped in pubescent angst, Freudian peculiarities and ghostly allusions to the spirits of cinema past that the filmmaking—hazy, fragmentary, jump-cut to oblivion—feverishly scrambles to keep up.