Where to begin with Guy Maddin

When Guy Maddin premiered his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), it seemed so impossibly weird and stylistically and thematically recondite that it might well have remained a one-off. Surely this couldn’t be the springboard for not just an entire career but an impressively prolific one, and in a very similar vein?

Fortunately, Maddin is based in Canada, which has a proud tradition of nurturing its creative oddballs (he even received the Order of Canada in 2012), and if his cinema features have occasionally been intermittent (2024’s Rumours is the first in a decade), he’s more than compensated creatively with a vast array of other projects: short films, gallery installations, various writings, bizarre artistic ‘happenings’, you name it.

As for Rumours itself (which Maddin co-wrote and co-directed with his regular collaborators, the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson), it’s as if he’s never been away. It may be initially disconcerting to see a Guy Maddin film open with the Universal ident, and no less so to see its opening scenes playing out in full-colour high-definition images. But the unmistakable Maddin touch increasingly encroaches as fog drifts across a German forest next to the isolated gazebo where G7 leaders (played deadpan by the likes of Cate Blanchett and Charles Dance) are drafting a cynically non-committal statement about a never-specified crisis. Admirably, unflappably, they continue to work on it even when surrounded by 2,000-year-old peat-bog zombies performing graphic fertility rituals, or after encountering a gigantic, seemingly human brain. These are incidental details that betray the identity of the film’s creators as surely as an onscreen credit.

And if Rumours is comparatively mild by Maddin standards – for instance, it lacks the usual barking mad, sometimes flash-frame intertitles and the deliberate impression of extreme surface damage to the film print – that makes it an excellent entry point before you continue exploring his unique universe.

Short films don’t often occupy this slot in the Where to begin series, but there’s no better or indeed more efficient introduction to Maddin than The Heart of the World (2000), a blazingly concentrated work of demented near-genius that crams more ideas and subplots into just six minutes than many filmmakers allocate for entire features.

To the strident accompaniment of Georgy Sviridov’s propulsive ‘Time, Forward!’ (originally written for an eponymous 1965 film, it subsequently became the theme tune for one of the Soviet Union’s main TV news programmes), it sets up a love triangle between two brothers, Nikolai (“Youth, Mortician”) and the long-haired, bearded Osip (“An Actor, Playing Christ in the Passion Play”) whose love for Anna (“State Scientist”) is all but guaranteed to end tragically – especially as she’s busy amassing evidence that the planet is about to suffer a potentially fatal heart attack.

All of this resembles a long-forgotten piece of Soviet constructivism from the 1920s, complete with ultra-grainy footage (plus inferior-quality dupe footage seemingly patched in from another source), scratches, tramlines, jump-cuts caused by visible splices, intertitles in multiple fonts, and so on. The climactic orgy of destruction – repeatedly intercut with the word ‘KINO’ – is a reminder that this began life as a commission from the Toronto International Film Festival to celebrate the art of cinema. Few love letters to the medium are quite this ardent. It’s utterly exhilarating, and hard to write about without taking regular breaks to watch it all over again.  

Maddin is so consistent that you could derive similar pleasures from pretty much anything with his name on it, provided you’re on the right wavelength to begin with. Tales from the Gimli Hospital isn’t an ideal starting point, as it’s visibly hobbled by its near-zero budget and its creator’s inexperience, but even that is so crammed with off-the-wall ideas that nobody’s going to say “Oh, no, not another semi-silent melodrama based on Icelandic folk tales featuring weird diseases and traditional buttock wrestling!”

Archangel (1990) and Careful (1992) are more immediately accessible, set respectively in the gas-filled (at one point fluffy white rabbit-filled) trenches of World War I and an Alpine community so terrified of avalanches that even the slightest movement or noise is rigorously policed – an environment that conceals a hotbed of suppressed and murderous passions. All three films resemble something made at the turn of the 1930s, that twilight-zone period of cinema history as filmmakers experimentally negotiated the awkward transition from silence to sound.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) turns an adaptation by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet into something more akin to a lost F.W. Murnau silent, while the ice-hockey melodrama Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) is semi-autobiographical, albeit more in the ‘slice-of-troubled-psyche’ sense than anything conventionally narrative-based. (Although his father really was the general manager of the Winnipeg Maroons team.)

The Saddest Music in the World (2003) was almost mainstream by his standards, with Isabella Rossellini playing a literally legless beer magnate (whose glass artificial legs are full of her company’s product) hosting a Eurovision-style song contest with points awarded for lachrymosity. Brand upon the Brain! (2006), a silent horror set in a lighthouse-turned-orphanage, was shown live with a benshi-style celebrity narrator. My Winnipeg (2007) is a typically Maddinesque love-letter to his home town that briefly revived the career of Detour’s Ann Savage, the scariest femme fatale in film noir.

More recently, collaborations with the Johnson brothers include the feature The Forbidden Room (2015), a mash-up of half-remembered, hazily recalled stories that nonetheless make dream-logic sense (Evan Johnson’s digital wizardry makes these images seem not merely decayed but actively rotting), and The Green Fog (2017), a ‘remake’ of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) using clips from other films and old television shows.

As for the 50-plus shorts, the titles alone can be glorious: Indigo High-Hatters (1991), The Pomps of Satan (1993), Fleshpots of Antiquity (2000), Fancy, Fancy Being Rich (2002), Nude Caboose (2006), Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair (2009, co-directed by Rossellini) and Hubby Does the Washing (2010). 

Sombra Dolorosa (2004) sees an old woman wrestling with Death, El Santo-style, in order to rescue her husband and daughter from his clutches. The title of Sissy-Boy Slap-Party (2004) is wholly accurate, but mere words fall hopelessly short of conveying its hysterically orgiastic content. And My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005) sees Isabella Rossellini paying centenary tribute to her father Roberto, represented by a pendulous belly (her abiding memory of him), but such is Maddin’s respect for his collaborator (who plays her mother Ingrid Bergman as well as a variety of male supporting roles) that he never lets his own preoccupations swamp hers.

There’s not much contest here: Maddin’s 1997 feature Twilight of the Ice Nymphs misfired so badly that it might have torpedoed his career altogether. Shooting for the first time on 35mm with a full professional crew, and with an impressively culty cast that included Alice Krige, Shelley Duvall and Frank ‘The Riddler’ Gorshin, by Maddin’s own self-lacerating admission he simply wasn’t ready to take on a project of this magnitude, and extensive producer interference (also a first) didn’t help matters.

Of course, no Maddin film is entirely devoid of interest, and this fantastical journey to the island of Mandragora, a mythical place where the sun never sets, has a woozily ethereal beauty unlike that of any of his other films, its colour scheme resembling florid 1940s Technicolor. Longstanding Maddin devotees may well be able to tease out enough buried nuggets to justify the experience, but beginners should definitely beware.

Rumours is in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, from 6 December.