The outside world, like centenarian film-stock, dissolves in acid-hued pools right around you. Outside world? What outside world? We are all film down here.

| Jan 14, 2022

Maddin's films are often classified as experimental, even though he's regurgitating vintage cinematic styles and melting them into his own particular stew, with his latest being a passionate, intoxicating frenzy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 8, 2020

Evokes a forgotten aesthetic that feels as if we have unearthed a buried treasure.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 7, 2019

It's a demented montage, "a boggling puzzlement" that defies you to search - fruitlessly - for a narrative thread.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2019

It's a film that has endless rewatch value because it's impossible to remember every detail from it. It's one of the most perfect collections of imperfections ever made.

| Original Score: 9/10 | May 24, 2019

The Forbidden Room is a comic, mystical melodrama that will puzzle your socks off and then return them to you freshly laundered before they were even removed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 8, 2019

Searching for that now giant key needed to unlock the door to return to reality, Maddin must take hostages. We join him, in cinephilia, in its celebration, in keeping it alive.

| Jan 24, 2019

... one of [director Guy Maddin's] most accomplished films and it's sure to delight his cult audience.

| Feb 15, 2018

[Forbidden Room] is an inventive, audacious, and outright hilarious tour de force whatzit.

| Nov 15, 2017

Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room plays like a super cut of films from different countries, genres, and eras.

| Aug 21, 2017

The film doesn't disappear, of course. It just folds into itself, again and again, ultimately transforming into an ecstatic, enclosed, gloriously self-indulgent expression of pure filmic desire.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 8, 2017

An intense and explosive sensory experience; An elegant delirium that injects vigor into contemporary cinema by returning faith to the power of the imagination. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2017

Canadian iconoclast Guy Maddin has been making strange, surreal films that evoke the images and storytelling traditions of silent movies for decades. The Forbidden Room (2015)... is like a compendium of his obsessions and cinematic fetishes.

| Mar 17, 2016

The bad part is that at over two hours long the film is not that good.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 14, 2016

Whilst The Forbidden Room is overlong and messy, it is still a lightning bolt of creativity from one of the most enigmatic and compelling filmmakers working today.

| Original Score: Recommended | Mar 3, 2016

Dense and lacking the playful quality of his more straightforward work, this represents a new multi-narrative direction for Maddin.

| Original Score: B- | Feb 24, 2016

There's a strange comfort in knowing that Freud's fascinating topography of the mind will never be completely discredited while Maddin is making deliriously absurd movies.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 23, 2016

What Maddin & Co. have invented here ranges from Freudian horror to childish naughtiness.

| Feb 18, 2016

An exhausting and overwhelming film to experience, but there's also something exhilarating about its mad energy and boundless invention.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2015

Once again, Maddin draws his inspiration from cinema's transitional phase between silent and sound, and he is abetted wonderfully by production designer Galen Johnson and cinematographer Stéphanie Weber-Biron.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 13, 2015