Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room is a hilarious nesting doll of lost cinema

Consequently, summarizing “what it’s about” is a nearly impossible task. A hilarious prelude features Maddin regular Louis Negin—who, like many of the actors here, will play multiple roles—narrating an instructional film about how to take a bath, inspired by a lost 1937 short film actually called How To Take A Bath. Following that, the movie proper seems to begin, involving a group of men trapped in a submarine with 500 pounds of depressurized “blasting jelly,” unable to surface without blowing themselves up. This story is entertainingly ridiculous in and of itself—it has the men trying to conserve oxygen by eating pancakes, on the theory that pancakes have large pockets of air. It gets even sillier when a hatch opens—at the bottom of the ocean—and a bewildered woodsman (Roy Dupuis) stumbles onto the sub. He proceeds to tell the other men his bizarre story, triggering a flashback. Then another flashback gets triggered within his story. Then another, and then another. Ultimately, The Forbidden Room gets so far up its own ass that it requires a series of consecutive climaxes to find its way back out.

A few movies have attempted something like this before (most notably The Saragossa Manuscript, a Polish film from 1965), but not with this degree of deliberate insanity. The Forbidden Room was shot mostly at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, piecemeal, in front of a live audience, following which Maddin and Johnson artfully distressed the digital footage and added priceless intertitles. The project took advantage of whichever actors were available to it on a given day, making it far and away Maddin’s most star-studded picture (albeit mostly with French stars); Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier, Caroline Dhavernas, Charlotte Rampling, Adèle Haenel, and Ariane Labed are among the folks who show up, often just for one mini-narrative. For those attuned to Maddin’s goofy sense of humor, it’s easily the funniest movie he’s ever made—a series of several dozen comic shorts strung together on a ludicrous clothesline. The only downside is that the experience, at just shy of two hours, can be a trifle exhausting. At a certain point, before it starts the journey back to the submarine, The Forbidden Room feels as if it may just go on forever, telling every story from Jorge Luis Borges’ Library Of Babel (an imaginary building, much larger than our universe, containing every possible book). But that’s the nature of a rabbit hole.