If you have never seen any Guy Maddin film and are a film addict looking for new cinematographic experiences, or else if you are just open-minded enough to pass over dominant schemes, take your chance! Prepare – or rather do not prepare –, rush to see Guy Maddin’s latest film: Brand Upon the Brain! The discovery will be even more striking, refreshing and, above all, dazing. Experimental in its form, yet not elitist, Brand Upon the Brain! is built as a “remembrance in 12 chapters” and drags you down to a fantastic tale where images in Super 8, expressionist black and white, colours strokes, falsely subliminal intertitles, aerophonic sounds, Jason Staczek’s music and Isabella Rossellini’s voice take you to the guts, quite literally. Because Brand Upon the Brain!, is also a genre movie (in the many senses of the term): myths and mythology melt in a maelstrom of secrets, obsessions, desires, primal fears and strange holes hidden deep into the memory of a character named Guy, first as a man then as a child. An hypnotic trip derived from psychoanalysis and poetry.
Financed by The Film Company, an independent American film studio, which supports authors and lets them free to run their projects, Brand Upon the Brain! proves, in a new context for Guy Maddin but in a quasi-synthetic way, the stupefying vitality of a work like no other.
If Maddin’s aficionados (Careful, Archangel, Tales of the Gimli Hospital, Cowards Bend the Knee, The Saddest Music in the World) will be satisfied to identify the organic and visual touch of the on the margins filmmaker, newcomers will enjoy this cinematographic food without any conservatives where senses are filled with wonder. An unforgettable mystical trip to a forever lost past: the one of an awakening childhood.

Read Guy Maddin’s interview and watch the trailer now!

Synopis: Whatever are young “Guy Maddin’s” parents really up to in their lighthouse home/orphanage on a chilly remote island? Overbearing Mother tracks her son’s every move, bellowing for him to come home over the “Aerophone” just as something interesting is about to happen! And poor Sis, his older sister (who is rapidly blossoming into a young woman)–Mother will never let her have any fun! The intrigue continues as deranged Mother, hellbent on restoring her youth and sinister Scientist-Father who is sequestered night and day in his basement laboratory, engage in diabolical, secret experimentation. When new parents of recently adopted children from the orphanage notice strange wounds on the youngsters’ necks, a pair of teen sleuths, Wendy and her brother Chance, known as “The Lightbulb Kids,” appear on the island to investigate–and in the process, inspire Guy’s first crush and Sis’ first love affair. The lurid family secrets that unfold are positively shocking.

Françoise Duru

More details about Guy Maddin’s films:
Archangel
Careful
Dracula
Cowards Bend the Knee
The Saddest Music in the World