Weird...even for a Guy Maddin movie.Brilliant...even for a Guy Maddin movie. A quote from Richard Linklater's ingenious philosophical film "Waking Life" seems to sum up Guy Maddin's "Brand Upon the Brain!" perfectly: "...and on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion." That is what this film is...in short. It is a salsa dance with Maddin's confusion, it is a romantic evening of self...or, more accurately, is a snippet from this so called "romantic evening" or, even more accurately, it is a collection of many snippets from this "evening." "Brand Upon the Brain!" is a dreamscape...it is a stream of consciousness which has been infiltrated with demented undrinkable water...undrinkable water that Maddin sips with a smile on his face for 95 minutes."Brand Upon the Brain!" is an exploration of childhood, human sexuality, and the complicated relationship a boy has with his mother...it's also about love triangles, lesbians, cross dressers, cannibals, orphans, childhood, nostalgia, regret, guilt, love, loss, death, reanimation, zombies...it's science fiction...it's autobiography...it's a mess...it's perfectly put together...the editing is jerky and jiggedy...the style is quick...fast cuts...jump cuts!...words...screen of text!...a line of dialogue...a single exclamation...like "Don't" or "Jump!" or "Something!" like that...there's German Expressionist stuff, obvious tributes to everything from "Nosferatu" to Eisenstein and "Vampyr" to "Eraserhead"...but it's all original. The film is framed with the tale of a man (named after the film's maker, Guy Maddin) who is attempting to erase his traumatic past...a past filled with deep personal tragedy, relatable self discovery, pitch black absurdist comedy, Gothic horror, flights of fantasy, boyish lust, and this and that and this and that...much of his past is pure fiction...most of it stems, however, from some great hidden truth...some vague memories and images scattered around that can only be recreated with a loony, goofy, creepy tragedy like this one...

Nice to have to films recently that really connected with me.This one seems to have found a bypass straight to my subconscious in parts. Perhaps due to the flickering quality, of the retro silent shooting? The black and white hip and hypnagogic approach. I really did find myself on that threshold of awareness and dream.At the outset, I thought Maddin was making a film through found footage, so good was the choppiness of the scenes and the sea. It must have been amazing to see this with a live narrator and better yet a team of foley fiends. But seeing it alone, that also helped with the films resonance.The story as such is a strange slurry, as others have denoted. Twisted personal archetypes (the male protagonist sharing the filmmaker's name and likely a largesse of his angst). After seeing this, I'm hard-pressed on how to put it all together. It's like a 3D puzzle that I now find flattened in my hands.And I'm not film student, just a fan, but I suspect this is rife with opportunity for many a thesis. Nosferatu shadows. Lighthouse introspection. Sexual innuendo and overdoses. Owning the video is certainly an option, with its multiple narrated versions (including Crispin Glover and Laurie Anderson), and its surfeit of cinematic sensation. The soundtrack as jagged as the isolated island's coastline, competes well with the aforementioned foley fun.Fans of outre film, like the Ann Arbor Film Fest can look inward in many ways with this.I find myself drifting closer to the Maddin crowd.9/10

I didn't manage to see this until the last day (it played but a week here in little Burlington VT, no surprise) and I was the sole patron at the showing, but it was worth it, and seeing a film alone in a theater seems fitting when we're talking about Maddin, whose films are certainly the definition of personal and uncompromising, never geared towards a mainstream audience, or anybody it seems but Maddin himself.Brand Upon the Brain! continues the frenetic, almost entirely montage-based style that was first evident (from what I've seen anyway) in Heart of the World; I don't know how many shots there are in the 100 minutes or so of the film, but I'd guess it's got to be over a thousand. "Guy Maddin" returns home to the lighthouse where he grew up (yes, this is typical Maddin!) on a remote island....somewhere....and his memories take him back to childhood, to the tyrannical mother and weird inventor father who kept him a virtual prisoner along with the orphans in the school they run, until one day they are visited by girl detective Wendy Hale, star of the "Hale Twins" books for boys and girls, who is convinced that there is a mystery to be solved on the island....What follows is madcap sexual perversions, gender confusion, strange Dr. Moreau-like experiments, a fairly sick mother-son relationship and an extraordinarily implausible love triangle, all done in furious silent black-and-white montage, with dramatic and urgent Isabella Rossellini narration and beautiful, sometimes frightening music by Jason Staczek. This is one of Maddin's faster-paced, more propulsive films, though it does seem to end about half a dozen times and there is a bit of a long-in-the-tooth aura both to the story itself and its telling. On the whole, though, it's another wonderfully inventive and magical journey to a lost era in film-making and a warped and resolutely uncommercial creative mind, and is for this fan at least, proof that Maddin is the oddest, and most fascinating filmmaker this side of David Lynch.theatrical viewing

Make no mistake about it, Canada's Guy Maddin is an enigma. We're talking about somebody who's main inspiration seems to be old Soviet newsreels (the Kino Pravda series,to be exact,by Dziga Vertov,the father of the newsreel). Watching 'Brand Upon The Brain' was very much like watching an old Kino Pravda (Cinema Truth,by the way,for those who don't speak Russian)newsreel while running a temperature about 110 degrees,while on a mixture of psychedelic mushrooms washed down with codeine based cough syrup (and I wouldn't want it any other way!). The plot (but who needs a plot in a film like this?) concerns a middle aged man who is by some strange twist of fate, named Guy Maddin, returns to the island he grew up as a young boy, and hasn't been back in over 30 years,to try & clean up the old lighthouse/orphanage he grew up in. All I can say is....man!....if I had as screwed up a childhood as Maddin had, I guess I would turn out making films as bizarre as Maddin's are (not that I'm saying that's bad,mind you---check out his short film 'Heart Of The World',which won an award some years back as the best experimental short at some film festival who's name I forget). Although the film features a cast of unknowns (on these shores at any rate),it benefits from a narrative by Isabella Rossilini (daughter of Ingrid Bergman & Roberto Rossilini),who is unfortunately never seen on screen. Honestly, you can do a lot worse than not seeing 'Brand Upon The Brain', but why would you want to?