The sophomore feature from Winnipeg director Guy Maddin confirms the promise of his offbeat 1988 debut 'Tales From the Gimli Hospital', although perhaps with a hint of understandable redundancy. Maddin's peculiar aesthetic is the same, borrowing extensively from the primitive vocabulary of early sound productions (circa 1928-1930), but this time the action is updated from Icelandic fable to the Russian Revolution, a popular setting for Hollywood melodramas during the late silent/early sound era. Every anachronism is flawlessly presented, from the flickering black and white photography to the scratchy music score and crude post-dubbed dialogue, but like 'Gimli Hospital' the macabre (to say the least) plot is pointed straight at today's midnight cult cinephiles. Only the details are different: instead of dead seagull therapy and ritual butt-grabbing duels to the death (both highlights of the earlier film), audiences can enjoy an odd, amnesiac love quadrangle, climaxing when one character uses his own intestines to strangle the Bolshevik barbarian who disemboweled him. Not surprisingly, comparisons have been drawn to the early films of David Lynch, who next to Maddin is more in the same league as Frank Capra.

During the First World War, a Canadian soldier, devastated by the recent death of his fiancee, arrives at the frozen Russian city of Archangel. While billeted with a local family, he is astonished to discover a woman that may or may not be the lover he thought lost. Unfortunately, she is suffering from amnesia and remembers nothing of their former passion. A rival suitor, claiming to be her husband and who may also be suffering from amnesia, is equally unsuccessful at winning her affection. The melancholy story plays itself out against the madness of the Great War.

Filming entirely indoors with homemade props and costumes, director Guy Maddin has created a very strange and intense movie. Cribbing heavily from the look and atmosphere of German expressionist cinema, Maddin goes much further in exploring some very human issues: loss, love, memory and redemption. He also examines patriotism and by stylistically depicting the horrors of trench warfare he delivers a pacifist message that reminds me of movies like Grande Illusion and All Quiet on the Western Front. The ultimate power of this movie, however, lies in the sense of alienation we see among the characters. They are not only unable to love each other, they are barely able to communicate. In fact, under the cloud of forgetfulness that is a major theme in this movie, the characters are often not even capable of recognizing one another at all!

Some movies can be called nightmare movies or like Lynch's Eraserhead, "a dream of dark and troubling things" and while Archangel is a film that falls into the "dream" genre, it is sort of like a whole bunch of mini-dreams that you get during catnaps strung together, and as such, is easily one of the most insane movies I have ever seen. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.