Keyhole

The hallucinatory and decidedly unhinged new film by idiosyncratic auteur Guy Maddin is a ghost story/gangster flick/Homeric quest in the singular, movie-mad Maddin mode. Jason Patric plays mobster Ulysses Pick, returning home after a long absence with both a corpse and a living captive in tow — and the police in hot pursuit. A tense stand-off ensues between Ulysses’ fractious gang of hoodlums inside and the coppers outside, while our hero wanders his spooky, ramshackle house in search of estranged wife Hyacinth (played by Isabella Rossellini). The peculiar proceedings are narrated by the naked elderly man (Louis Negin) chained to a bed upstairs! “Maddin’s mad mélange of melodramatic ghosts and meddlesome mobsters frames a memory tour like none other, exploding two genres with one powerful pop ... Keyhole is a homecoming of a kind only Guy Maddin can pull off” (panellist Peter Howell). “Maddin’s latest affirms his commitment to cinema of brazen originality (Toronto I.F.F.). B&W, 35mm. 105 mins.