Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! puts at the forefront the director’s philosophy of fevered, laudatory resurrection of long-dormant movie magic in the form of a quasi-autobiographical treatise on childhood memories. This is the first Maddin feature that does not most clearly appear as a pastiche of silent or early talkie film techniques, a style Maddin inventively and captivatingly used in the past in a manner that tried not to emulate the artistic and emotional syntax of the past but rather tried to propel them forward with their hidden energies, and in doing so bring them alive-again in the eyes of the contemporary film goers. He would use a style that selected bits and pieces of underused style, expression, language (written, spoken, and cinematic), and atmosphere from the Golden Age and heighten them, montage them, and finally compress and compact them into narratives of such fetishistic frenzy as to easily become something of their own, utterly in love with and tied to the Old Ways but reinvesting them with a kind of manic-nostalgic love that is itself one of a kind. Brand Upon the Brain! moves beyond, or at least around, this style in its way, instead using its amorphous narrative rather than its stylistic formalism to emphasize this preoccupation with the re-enlivened experience.

It begins with Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs) returning to his childhood home, a lighthouse orphanage run by his puritanical watchdog mother (keeping her place at the helm of the house’s light so as to keep track of her children’s lives and their secrets) and his secretive and generally absent father, found toiling away in the house’s mysterious laboratory. All these figures are now long gone, but Guy calls his childhood to mind as he swathes new coats of paint on the old lighthouse. The setting itself allows Maddin to get outside the studio and shows that the filmmaker does not need to rely on baroque artificial to conjure up delirious beauty—the frantic pacings on the beach, between its regurgitating waves, brief-color flashes of desire, sea-side graves, and lithe and bare tree trunks allow the film to express a more open longing than the closeted claustrophobia of sets convey. Guy swoons in the pulsing memories of the arrival of the female half of a famous detective duo, Wendy (Katherine E. Scharhon), and his crush on her, and in turn her crush on his sister (Maya Lawson, without a doubt Maddin’s most striking, beautiful actress, and one whose features clearly arc backwards to the emblematically odd beauty of many classical stars). The film’s skittish plot, which jumps hither and thither with little need of chronology (even though it is there), follows both young Guy’s yearnings to escape the claustrophobic and very Freudian attentions of his mother and embrace his crush on Wendy, as well as following the detective work of Wendy, who, smitten with Guy’s sister, goes undercover as her brother Chance to seduce the girl properly, as well as to find out the secret behind the mother and father’s odd and perhaps diabolical use of the orphanage children.

From these jealous, sexually obsessed starting points, Maddin (along with long-time script collaborator George Toles) spins not necessarily his characteristic fevered impressions as he does the frenzied overlap of memories. The emphasis is on the unrequited longing of recollection, of repetitions, echoes, and habits, re-capitulations, and the way such heightened boyhood worries, passions, and doubts can but weigh heavily on the mind, irrepressible, unforgettable, and unfixable. As such, Maddin is less concerned with making his film itself erupt with the fetishized, warped goodies of his past manner of neo-archaic filmmaking technique, as Brand Upon the Brain! itself is concerned thematically with the director’s love of cinema, whose resurgences are linked with the unstoppable waves of memories that roll onward, ever to repeat but repeat differently (like Wendy’s cross-dressing, and Guy’s boy crush on Chance), to exaggerate, heighten, and turn absurd all that is formulative in one’s life. (Absurdity is of course key, this is, after all, an “auto-biography” about a lighthouse keeper’s son and his bisexual crush on his sister’s lover!)

While the film itself seems far more scattered, drawn-out, and more undistinguished than Maddin’s best—in its own solipsistic way repeating the Freudian obsessions of Coward’s Bend the Knee (2004) but with less delinquent, idiosyncratic expression, energy, and anxious concision—its presentation is utterly unforgettable. The film is a silent one, which uses intertitles, as most Maddin films do, to communicate dialog, exposition, and dramatic description. But for the first time Maddin has supplemented his silent filmmaking with live sound effects: Jason Staczek conducting his own score for the film (which is exceptional, and teasingly reminiscent of Philip Glass’ score for the 1931 Dracula), three live foley artists dreamily simulating some, but not all, sound effects (waves, door slams, foot steps, bubbling potions, kisses), and finally Isabella Rossellini serving as an “interlocutor,” less a narrator than a free-floating exclamation, Rossellini’s wonderful and strange accent befitting her descriptions, moans, intertitle-redundant repetitions, and nostalgic ruminations. As befitting someone so familiar with classical cinema, Maddin has always had an acute use of sound, whether it is the dreamy out-of-sync vocal dubbing on a film like Archangel (1990) or the edited use Mahler in Maddin’s ballet film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). But here more than ever before does the director use sound to envelope his film in miasmic layers, perfectly befitting the picture’s preoccupations with objects and sensations conjuring up layered, inter-related memories, as one has to wade through the at once disparate and clashing live audio voices but also view (that is, hear) them as a harmonious hodge-podge every bit as consumed with shifting moods, stories, obsessions, and selective slices of remembered scenes as Maddin and editor John Gurdebeke’s urgently pulsating montage is. This makes the lived experience of watching Brand Upon the Brain! appropriately more remarkable than what the film would presumably be like either silently or with a similar, but recorded, audio track. The film may be oddly slight and treading artistic water by Maddin’s fine standards, but strangely in tune with Brand Upon the Brain!’s themes, the memory of the amazing live experience will stay with me long down the road, and may inevitably be re-lived with some disappointment when the canned version comes out to play in theatres and on video.