Movie reviewer: Keyhole

Keyhole - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Filmcritic.com RSS Twitter Facebook filmsite.org The Greatest Films 100 Greatest Films Greatest Quotes The Oscars Most Controversial Films amctv.com Story Matters Here AMC Movie Guide AMC News Games & Quizzes In Theaters New Reviews: American Reunion ATM The Hunter (2012) Keyhole We Have a Pope Wrath of the Titans Mirror Mirror (2012) Dark Tide The Island President Goon Turn Me On, Dammit! Womb The Hunger Games October Baby Brake The Trouble With Bliss See All In Theaters Reviews

New On DVD New Reviews: The Iron Lady (2011)Into the Abyss (2011)The Darkest Hour (2011)Sleeping Beauty (2011)War Horse We Bought a Zoo Tyrannosaur Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey The Double Hour Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked A Dangerous Method In the Land of Blood and Honey Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel El Bulli: Cooking in Progress The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) See All New On DVD Reviews

Top Rated By the filmcritic critics By the filmcritic community Columns & Features Recent Stories Evil ... or the Victim of Framing? Bad Guys in Science Fiction Film 5 Movie Characters That Changed the Way We View Women 5 Lessons from the Hit "Hunger Games" and the Flop "John Carter" The Best Comic Book Movie Trailers of All Time Top Movie Columns John Scalzi on Scifi Nick Nadel on Comic Book Movies Thelma Adams on Reel Women Sridhar Pappu on Sports Flicks Movie Mix Tape Top Ten See All Columns & Features

Trailers & Video Coming to Theaters In Theaters New on DVD Trailers by Genre Trailers by Decade In Theaters Keyhole Reviewed by Chris Cabin on Apr 5 2012

Rated by critic: Rated by users: Rated by you:

Chris Cabin Beloved by Ebert. full bio of Chris Cabin

Over the last two decades or so, Guy Maddin has cut out an interesting niche for himself, a very careful mixture of filmic nostalgia and personal memory tempered with an oddly modern perversity. Working entirely in black and white and shooting almost entirely on Super 8, Maddin's aesthetic leans (arguably too hard) on a sense of buried discovery; each of his films feels and looks lost, as if found in the ruins of some subterranian kingdom of dirt.

Keyhole, Maddin's first full-length film since his stunning quasi-doc My Winnipeg, constitutes what could charitably be called a transitional picture but is also remarkably close to a catastrophe. Shot on digital, it loses that discovery which gave Maddin's batshit narratives the quality of a fever dream, from the island of misfits in Brand Upon the Brain! to the hallucinatory gothic twitches of Cowards Bend the Knee and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary. The look is clean and clear, devoid of that sumptuous layer of grain, and suddenly Maddin's material is imbued with a unsettling newness; it's the first fully narrative film from the Canadian auteur that feels as if it's of this decade.

Isabella Rossellini, Maddin's eternal muse, however, remains, playing Hyacinth, the specter of a long departed, tellingly named wife who haunts the home she shared with her gangster husband. Jason Patric, who is likely the most popularized actor to show up in any Maddin movie to date, plays the husband, Ulysses Pick, who shows up carrying a woman who believes she has at once drowned or is in the midst of drowning. With the law at their door, Ulysses and his gang decide to hide out in the home where Ulysses and Hyacinth once lived, a home now haunted and riddled with furious, dangerous memories capable of overtaking any living being and bringing them into the eternal otherworld.

The film is something of a voyage through time, through the past that Ulysses has neglected or forgotten -- Ulysses has taken his own son as a hostage and communicates with his dead wife through the titular opening for most of the film. At once excitedly hallucinatory, narratively congested and aesthetically laborious, Keyhole suggests a move forward for Maddin in terms of influence, from the creative madness of Melies, Murnau, and Pabst to the more feverish noirs of Duvivier, Preminger and Aldrich. But the director's storytelling style, prone as it is to grotesque asides and warped subplots, is anything but economical, and Maddin's haunted house, though often unpredictable and unsettling on occasion, feels more like a kitchen sink for his narrative invention than any consistent expression of Ulysses or Maddin's repressed, frustrated memory.

So, as Maddin keeps three narrative streams going -- Hyacinth's ghost world, Ulysses's voyage, and the quickly dwindling group of lackeys on the first level -- we spin further into the director's style and further away from anything resembling ideas or concise craft. It's a pestering, baffling, and exhausting experience, a nightmare of auteurism taken to its most radical lengths where semblance remains only as a bare, single thread employed only to allow Maddin, who wrote the script with regular co-scripter George Toles, to keep his creation moving.

Patric, a talented performer, looks the part of a sullen, haunted criminal lost in memory but Maddin's script takes the viewpoint of the house and its ghosts above Ulysses, making him just another crazed machine of unregulated oddness rather than the film's anchor. He is a mere slave to the Eisensteinian onslaught of Maddin's home on haunted hill. While all of the filmmaker's prior films have involved flights of fancy, Keyhole offers no promise of landing on solid ground or breaking through the atmosphere. It's a perpetual acid-trip comedown.