Director: Guy Maddin. Screenplay: Guy Maddin, George Toles. Cinematography: Benjamin Kasulke. Film editing: John Gurdebeke. Art direction: Noel Paul, Apryl Richards. Production design: Tania Kupczak. Music: Jason Staczek. Producers: Amy Jacobson, Gregg Lachow. With: Isabella Rossellini, Katherine E. Scharhon, Sullivan Brown, Kellan Larson, Gretchen Krich, Todd Moore, Andy Loviska, Maya Lawson, Erik Steffen Maahs, Cathleen O’Malley, Clayton Corzatte, Susan Corzatte, Megan Murphy, Annette Toutonghi, David Lobo, Eric Lobo. USA/Canada. 98 min. 2006.
Among the many characters in this teeming melodramedy is a lad identified as Young Guy Maddin, one of many mistreated children living on an island populated mostly by orphans, including one Savage Tom, who begins the film by conducting a black mass for the other youngsters, during which he prepares to cut the beating heart out of little Neddy, who’s been a bundle of tics and twitches since accidentally killing his brother by throwing a beloved toy into a high-voltage transformer, which….
But you get the idea. This high-energy romp is vintage Maddin from first frame to last, chockablock with antic images, unexpected sounds, and plot twists so labyrinthine that it’s doubtful anyone, the real Guy Maddin included, could summarize them without peeking at a cheat sheet. And it’s all wrapped in the quintessential Maddin look, as if the movie print you’re watching was made from an antique negative stored for the past several decades under very, very bad conditions. Rossellini is the narrator and Scharhon leads the cast as girl detective Wendy Hale and her male alter ego Chance Hale, parodies of characters from old-fashioned boys’ adventure books; compared with them the Chums of Chance in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day are tame and predictable. The picture is longer than it needs to be, but that’s just a cavil. Nobody should miss it. You’ll leave the theater with a brand upon the brain! – David Sterritt
