In his debut, Maddin’s unparalleled ability to conjure vintage dreamscapes with limited resources was already fully evident, even if many of his stylistic and storytelling signatures were not yet developed. Without making any readily discernible references to film history, Tales from the Gimli Hospital suggests a pastoral Griffith melodrama crossed with Dreyer’s Vampyrand discharged as some kind of blood-spattered, low-budget bromance with traces of both the awkward early sound era and the color-tinted silent cinema of the 1910s. After a quick prologue in a hospital in Gimli, Manitoba (an amusing glimpse of a 7-Eleven “Big Gulp” situates us in the modern era, though the rickety jazz music emitting from an old radio complicates that timeline), the film goes on to visualize a series of tales told by a creepy nurse to a pair of young siblings. In a Gimli long past, two Icelandic settlers, visibly sweating under hot production lights, suffer both lovesickness and smallpox infection and ultimately become enmeshed in a battle for the affections of a trio of lovely nurses (among other vengeful romantic entanglements). As his career progressed, Maddin would significantly finesse the stylistic roughness established here, but the fascination with extravagantly imaginary alternate histories reveals the director in pure embryonic form.