Five years in the making, The Forbidden Room is a masterful and mischievous ode to cinema. Guy Maddin and codirector Evan Johnson researched the terrain of lost cinema, using it as the inspiration for their narrative, an epic phantasmagoria where parenthetical stories are nested within stories, running the gamut from tales of amnesia, captivity, deception, and murder to skeleton women and vampire bananas. Wild and relentless, the creative energy of this work is exceptional. Featuring an international cast—Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, and Jacques Nolot, among others—the film re-creates the look of now long-obsolete film stocks.