Somewhere north of Winnipeg is the village of Gimli, an isolated outpost of forlorn fishermen, many of them Icelandic immigrants. It is in this remote hamlet that Maddin weaves his first feature-length tale, a fishy concoction of Scandinavian folklore, male ribaldry, and a visual lure that throws Carl Dreyer, David Lynch, and George Kuchar into the same tacklebox. Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a pseudo-saga about a dejected fisherman named Einar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch) who contracts a weblike pox and is confined in a strange hospital where the nursing staff looks like it just fled a Helmut Newton shoot. Einar meets Gunnar (Michael Gottli), another pox patient, and the two begin vying for the attention of those vampy vested nurses. Drawing on his Icelandic heritage, Maddin satirizes with a rheumy affection local customs such as cleansing one's face with straw and extracting fish oil as a hair gel. But Gimli Hospital throws its net wider than local lore: Maddin's fantastical form of sudsy surrealism is an homage to the deep seas of cinemas past. It will leave you reeling.