Teaming up with a co-director for the first time in fellow Winnipegian visual effects artist Evan Johnson, Maddin bursts forth with The Forbidden Room into unexplored aesthetic and structural territory even as he arrives ultimately at the rawest, most poetically Maddinesque object in a career already brimming with unfiltered discharges from the id: a film with an increasingly decaying memory of itself. Longtime Maddin regular Louis Negin materializes onscreen to hold a sermon on bathing rituals, the bubbles in the tub segue into deep ocean waters, and a nervous crew of underwater explorers idles under tons of marine pressure until suddenly a bearded jungle man emerges from a vent to divulge his story of indoctrination into a wolf-human clan—and that is only the first fifteen minutes of the movie. The Forbidden Room continues down a radioactive live wire of narrative convolution, rarely surfacing for air from its starting point, a perverse game of exquisite corpse that alternately evokes frantic channel hopping and the subterranean logic of the human subconscious. Transitions grow more and more deranged (at one point, we enter the daydream of a slain man’s moustache), protagonists swap out every few minutes, and the same actors reappear in as many as five ludicrous iterations. Most remarkably, Maddin and Johnson have cooked up a truly one-of-a-kind hybrid of high-definition digital and organic analog filmmaking, an aggressive fusion that makes their epileptic montage appear as though the surface of a boiling broth. 

Guy Maddin, along with collaborator Evan Johnson, repurposes found footage to explore different themes related to Winnipeg, which in this eerie segment centers on the dying elm tree as symbol for both the rise and fall of the city.

An animated collaboration, narrated by Maddin, of a story he allegedly found outside his elementary school as a kid, this short is a tribute to the Canadian folk hero Riel, who is portrayed as an inedible duck in this surreal adaptation.