The Forbidden Room: Can A Deranged Film Still Be Hilarious Amid Its Own Nonsense? (A Review)

This was my first Guy Maddin film, and regardless of the mixed feelings after watching The Forbidden Room, this won’t be my last. This 2015 Canadian low-budget experiment is amorphous, a string of short stories, in which the next one unfurls from a character’s memory in the last one. The Wikipedia page for the film labels its structure as a “nesting doll,” and eventually it takes us so many layers deep that the movie itself isn’t sure what’s been recapped and where it wants to go next. 

The Forbidden Room is unconcerned with making sense, having something to say, or making any money, but that never stops it from having a ton of fun. It’s what would happen if a random set of silent films were frankenstein-ed into a 2-hour slot on Adult Swim at 3 in the morning. 

For most of the runtime, it’s all over the place. The shell story is about a submarine crew panicking over their depleting oxygen levels. Other sequences include a woman with amnesia who is kidnapped and rescued, a man equally afraid and fascinated by the bust of Roman god Janus, and a doctor who mends a woman holding the world record for the “most bones ever broken” after a motorcycle crash. Sometimes actors are used as different characters across these stories, and sometimes these stories jump between each other to continue their plots. Even with the experience being a mishmash, the absurdity lies in the effort behind it. 

Continuing with the Wikipedia article, it mentions that many of the stories were inspired by lost films. Even with everything shot digitally, most scenes’ lighting pulsates like a scuffed up silent film, as if one day the prints were magically found in great-grandpa’s cluttered, dusty attic. A favorite touch was the use of title cards that go from giving us dialogue, to making a joke, to reminding us of the actor, sometimes accompanied by a small headshot of their reaction that felt like those moving images from Harry Potter. The only constant throughout, they not only pay homage to the silent era, but help establish a feel. In this film, a title card isn’t just for titles or dialogue. Any narrative rule can be bent if Maddin feels like doing so.

The issue with The Forbidden Room is that the initial burst of excitement, when the film shows us how crazy it’s willing to get, quickly turns into an exercise in patience. When things start at a level of “this is bonkers,” they can’t really raise to “this is more bonkers” to keep an audience engaged for a full feature-length film. Especially as the plots turn into an intentionally indiscernible body, they don’t build into something larger, but only offer another flavor of the same idea. At a certain point, we’re no longer curious about where it’s going… only about the amount of oxygen the submarine crew has left. 

2.5 out of 5 stars.