Review: Brand Upon The Brain! Death By Interlocution

updated 9pm EST, June 22


It is not often I find myself alone in a empty theatre in a city of two-million people, but that’s exactly what happened to me the other night at the Carlton when I saw Brand Upon The Brain! This phenomena had occured to me only once before in my movie going experiences – my wife and I spotted a showing of Monty Python and The Holy Grail at the Rainbow cinemas here in Toronto, and sure enough, we were the only ones their. I think in the case of Python, it wasn’t advertised well, and in the case of Brand Upon The Brain! it was the fact that it was a Canadian film by Guy Maddin that kept the people away.

With good reason too. The film is extremely inaccessible to the general audience. A revisionist silent art film about Guy’s revisionist youth, the film is told in almost entirely in a flash back consisting of grainy, flickering, 8mm step-printed footage, inter-titles, book like chapters, and cutting so rapid the climax of Requiem For A Dream seems slow in comparison. In short, it's pure Guy Maddin on speed.

Coming off the success of 2003s The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon The Brain! is somewhat of a leap backward for Guy Maddin in many different ways. Working with longtime writing partner George Toles, Maddin harkens back to his fictional youth. A house painter named “Guy Maddin,” (Erik Steffan Maahs) is called back to Black Notch island, where his mother and father once ran an orphanage in a lighthouse.

Home again, “Guy” remembers his past, a bizarre, unsettling, horrific youth in an orphanage, under the confines of his oppressive, sexually suspicous mother who obsesses about being an infant.

Mother runs a tight ship, constantly punishing Guy's sister for her femininty, and romantic trysts. Mother is always watchful and ever present, from high above, she using the light house search light to spy on her children. Always beckoning though the use of an “aerophone,” a phallic musical horn that carries sound like a telephone, invented by the mad scientist in the basement – Guy’s Father.

Father labours away at the fountain of youth all night, with midnight conjugal visits resulting in his wife becoming a young woman, until “Raging! Aging!” at her children, specifically Sis, she becomes a withered old woman again.

The orphans are imprisoned below in cages, and they have strange holes bored into their heads, holes that match the family ring that Father wears.

“Young Guy” played by Sulivan Brown is to Maddin, what Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel was to François Truffaut. That’s saying a lot, but I think it is an apt comparison. Sullivan Brown even looks like young Antoine Doinel, and closely resembles Guy Maddin himself.

The strength of the film is from the performances of the youngest actors, primarily Maya Lawson who plays Sis, and Katherine E. Scharhon playing a gender bending Nancy Drew named Wendy Hale. Wendy Hale becomes Chance Hale, her famous detective brother when she falls in love with Sis. She has to solve the mystery of the crimes that Mother and Father are commiting within the orphanage.

So as not to reveal her true identity, Wendy/Chance wears “kissing gloves” and the naughty “undressing gloves,” as Wendy/Chance takes a dominant role in the sexual relationship. It doesn’t hurt that the young women create a sense of tense erotica each time they pick up the “kissing gloves” and “undressing gloves,” standard equipment it seems for a detective.

Young Guy, pinning for Wendy who has suddenly disappeared, becomes enamored in a “Boy Crush” on Chase, but he’s spurned by Chance's love for his sister. The crush will haunt him into manhood.

The young women, who had to disrobe several times (almost everyone in at one point naked – lot’s of full frontal male nudity), come off as deeply charismatic, sensual, graceful and ethereal in their stylized theatric body movements. Their roles could not have been easy without dialogue, but they both carry it with ease.

Kellan Larson, Guy’s twitching, spastic best friend – the poor Neddie, who is almost sacrificed by the insane and naked Savage Tom (who is also locked away) also put in a delightful performance.

I shall not ruin the plot for those who care, but it contains everything that should make this an exciting cult film – satanic rituals, lesbianism, re-animation, science fiction, gothic horror, zombiesm, cannibalism, mystery, musical, Oedipal lust. Brand Upon The Brain! has it all.

What it doesn’t have, is an easily accessible story. Guy Maddin’s insistence of style over substance ensures that the audience is kept at arms length at all times and the film has fleeting dramatic weight. It comes across as a hyper stylized music video, or worse, an amateur experimental German expressionist silent film.

The film is at times can also be exceedingly beautiful. The string score by Jason Staczek is as good as any I’ve heard. The black and white imagery is gorgeous, base ball sized grain bouncing away on the screen. It is also extremely frustrating.

Sound is a major issue in Brand Upon The Brain! The only dialogue non-diagetic presented in way of “interlocuter,” Isabella Rossellini, who’s heavy accent seems out of place here. The folly work too can be grating. Every time Mother beckons through the “aerophon” it reminded me of “Kommienezuspadt” by Tom Waits, without the melody. Just German gibberish for effect.

The poetic inter-titles - “Secrets! Secrets! Secrets!”, “Aging! Raging!!” when ever his young mother played by three actresses Grethen Krich/Cathleen O’Malley/Susan Corzette, turned back into a middle aged woman - are often amusing, “Boy Crush!” for example, when Guy displays homoerotic lust for Chance - but are often lost within the staccato cutting.

Epileptics be aware, this film may make you seize. The images rush past you, and so does the story in haste to keep the running time down. Something that Guy could have learned from the silent era he so loves.

Guy Maddin practically invented the pastische silent cinema style (although I remember in Jules and Jim, Truffaut giving it a go), certainly it made him who he is – a cult Canadian filmmaker. When Emily Haines and the Soft Skeletons went on tour this past year to promote her Knives Don’t Have Your Back, Maddin’s silent era images played prominently in the background.

But in an age when even the Red Hot Chili Peppers can create a convincing silent film – Guy Maddin should be able to do it a thousand time better. Certainly something that adds to the genre, and escalates it to another level.

I have to say that I expected more from Guy Maddin after 2003’s The Saddest Music In The World. Instead we are presented with a regressive step backward in the filmmakers development, not because it is a clever journey into his fictional past, or because it is shot on 8mm, or completely without the hope of commercial success, but because Maddin has failed to be able to tell a story with the mastery as a filmmaker that his experience dictates. Had Madden preserved moments like the last breath of Mother tucked safely away in a bottle, the film would have allowed the viewer to engage in the inventive story.

Perhaps, had I seen the film with the touring orchestra, on stage folly artists, Crispin Glover filling in as interlocuter, a singing “castrato” I would have been immersed in the of event, as opposed to sitting alone with and being assaulted by the film as it is.

All in all, Guy Maddin's originality ensures that you won't seen anything else like it in cinemas this summer, but that also, you would be be hard pressed to find the film playing in your local theatres.


Executive Producers: Jody Shapiro, Philip Wohlstetter, A.J. Epstein.
Producers: Amy Jacobson, Gregg Lachow
Director: Guy Maddin
Writers: Guy Maddin & George Toles
Cast: Gretchen Kritch, Sulivan Brown, Maya Lawson, Katherine E. Scharhon, Todd Moore, Andy Loviska, Kellen Larson, Erik Steffan Maahs, Cathleen O’Malley. Interlocuter: Isabella Rosselini.
Musical score: Jason Staczek.
Cinematography: Benjamin Kasulke
Editor: John Gurdebeke
95 minutes.