Brand Upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin wrote and directed this wildly idiosyncratic look at one man revisiting his dysfunctional childhood. Guy (Erik Steffan Maahs) is a house painter who at the urging of his aging mother (Gretchen Krich) returns to the tiny Canadian island where he grew up to put a fresh coat of paint on the ...more

Movies are the ultimate extension of dreams. In the short time from the title to the credits, a movie can take the viewer into an all-enveloping realm of the unknown. Brand Upon the Brain is Canadian director Guy Maddin’s hallucinatory reimagination of his own childhood. It is a dreamworld that blurs the edges between the real and the imaginary while pulling us down a rabbit hole into the wonderfully strange world brewing in Maddin’s head. Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs) returns to an ...more

Any Guy Maddin film is a unique experience, and Brand Upon the Brain is no exception. In its initial theatrical engagements, the film was shown as a silent movie, accompanied not only by a live orchestra but by rotating on-site narrators and sound effects pros. Even without those extras and with pre-recorded sound effects, score and narration (by Isabella Rossellini, Brain remains a remarkable piece of cinema. True, not every viewer will get "into" Brain; there's a reason Maddin remains a cult ...more