"Keyhole" (Moviemail 14/09/12)

The films of the lo-fi Canadian maverick Guy Maddin once aspired to the qualities of silent melodrama, in part because this director didn’t have the resources to make anything else. Maddin has moved on since then – a little, at least. Keyhole offers a phantasmagorical mash-up of studio-era crime and horror tropes: it’s The Desperate Hours in The Old Dark House, though there are equally traces of David Lynch and The Tempest in the mix, and nothing is deemed too far out there to be absorbed. In the crime movies of the studio golden era, the family home was almost always a neutral venue, but Maddin’s house refuses to co-operate with its occupiers – the gang of bank robbers holing up during a storm, awaiting their leader – instead assuming a weird life of its own.

Arriving late with the blind girl he’s rescued from drowning, tough guy Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric) promptly hears the voice of our ghost narrator, informing him that his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) is being held captive on the building’s top floor. Non-supernatural features coming between the couple include an outdoors-indoors suite, where the rain lashes down and characters go to die; yet each new floor unleashes a whole new set of skeletons to rattle around. Only an exorcism – or a big skip – might sort this place out; instead, Udo Kier turns up after half an hour to treat us to a monologue about wasps.

The temptation is to shake one’s baffled head and write the whole thing off as an extended madlib, but it’s never boring, replete as it is with copious, pan-generational nudity, layered, almost subliminal imagery, most but not all of it phallic, and the use of the game Yahtzee as an analogue for self-gratification. The choicest cameo comes from the one-armed man getting his stump licked by an especially willing maid, though the wild-eyed, thick-bearded fellow condemned to pound a nail into a wall for all eternity runs him a very close second.

Again, it is possible just to marvel at Maddin’s ability to mount this kind of unpitchable, committee-proof vision on what is evidently a limited budget: even the insertion of “proper” actors like Patric and Rossellini into his universe hasn’t made the films any less niche. Set against the director’s best work – Careful (1992), Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) – this particular vision is cluttered and slapdash, and may only be fully comprehensible to Maddin himself, but it’s possible it might just tickle you somewhere about your person. For best viewing, you may want to enter the cinema as though it were open night at an underground filmmakers’ co-op circa 1966. Told you Maddin had moved on a little.

Keyhole opens in selected cinemas today.