✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Canada, United States · 2007
1h 35m
Director Guy Maddin
Starring Isabella Rossellini, Erik Steffen Maahs, Sullivan Brown, Gretchen Krich
Genre Drama, Fantasy
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Alongside his teenage sister and a horde of orphans, young Guy Maddin lazes away his youth on the mysterious island he will someday inherit. In the lighthouse orphanage where they all live, their every move is watched over by their overbearing mother while their father works away secretively in the basement.
We hate to say it, but we can't find anywhere to view this film.
Not to discredit its wild artistry by saying the gimmick's the prize, but . . . the gimmick's the prize. Without all the hoopla, there simply isn't enough variation to this stylized fever-dream to justify its fatiguing running time, nor to call it anything less than predictably Maddin–esque.
The result is giddy, exciting and hilarious, not quite like any artistic experience you've ever had.
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Enhanced by Jason Staczek's superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin's silent-movie models, frenetically edited.
Not many people are making silent horror serials these days, but Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin pushes his love of lurid melodrama to the limit in his latest demented treat, Brand Upon the Brain!
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Audacious, hypnotic and utterly breathtaking.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
Delirious, ingenious, often very funny and strangely touching film.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
The film is a singular achievement.
Billed as a silent film, Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! is actually closer to a live theatrical event -- a feature-length motion picture screened with the accompaniment of a live orchestra, plus Foley artists, sound effects technicians and assorted vocalists, too. Together, they provide the elaborate soundscape for a typically frenetic, Maddin-esque amalgam of the autobiographical, Freudian and willfully absurd.
Coming after the inspired trifecta of "Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary," "Cowards Bend The Knee," and "The Saddest Music In The World," Brand feels a little like boilerplate Maddin rather than a fresh burst of inspiration.
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