Here are review links for this film submitted by our members:
- Nicholas Bell @ Ioncinema
- Excerpt: majestic culmination of Maddin’s prowess in silent cinema tropes, a delirious, maddening rabbit hole of rippling nightmares that somehow, inextricably, fashion themselves into a cohesive narrative made up of cascading tangents
- Josh Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
- Robert Cashill @ Popdose
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: Maddin’s title cards alone…with their flowery, archaic innuendo, provide more belly laughs than most commercial comedies.
- Greg Klymkiw @ The Film Corner
- Excerpt: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to take a bath with Guy Maddin in his closet of tantalizing shame, his forbidden room. One story after another, either recounted by characters in one film and represented by another or told as stories within stories or, my favourite, as dreams within dreams, flash by us ever-so compellingly, taking us deeper into a liquid-like miasma, a ripe flatulence of wonder, a churning, roiling sea of volcanic lava – DEEPER, EVER-DEEPER INTO THE VERY CORE OF EXISTENCE AND CINEMA!!!!!
- [New – 12/31/15] | Daniel Lackey @ The Nightmare Gallery
- Excerpt: A big beautiful mess of a picture, almost always pretty to look at and to listen to, often extremely hard to follow
- Carson Lund @ Slant Magazine
- Excerpt: The Forbidden Room’s central gimmick—a collection of lost films from the recesses of moving-image history are re-made by Maddin and company and invited to converse with one another—is deceptively anthropological. What’s really happened is that this filmmaker, always fascinated less by bygone cinema in its actuality than by the interaction between old films and the complex mind of their viewer, has leveraged this experiment, at once a research project and a brainstorm, to chisel yet again into the depths of his own past.
- Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
- Excerpt: Every once in a rare while comes a film that lets an eccentric auteur unleash himself to his full potential, and The Forbidden Room is a richly dreamy, somnambulant kino-opera of style and experimentation.
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