Critics reviews

Cowards Bend the Knee might be [Maddin's] masterwork. It feels like a signpost work, a summary of Maddin's techniques and obsessions... Filmmakers will want to see Cowards twice just to appreciate its cutting. Maddin and his adventurous editor, John Gurdebeke, see past mere continuity and embrace editing's poetic and descriptive potential. The result is a movie that seems truly alive, one that appears to ripple through its own contents like a dreaming mind considering itself.

Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee is a deliriously over-the-top blend of operatic melodrama, recycled Greek tragedy, motifs pilfered from film noir, and silent-film conventions... Combining earnestness and deadpan humor with seemingly effortless flair is definitely one of Maddin achievements.

Cowards Bend the Knee is hardcore Maddin... Although the layered, metaphoric combination of masochistic fantasy and blatant wish fulfillment that constitutes the movie's narrative is irresistible, Maddin's mise-en-scène is no less remarkable than his evocation of forbidden desire and monstrous repression.

Canada's most rollicking and imaginative moviemaker does it again, setting a silent-movie plot about jealousy, insanity, and hands with a murderous mind of their own against backgrounds as different as a beauty salon and a hockey arena that houses a forgotten wax museum. There's a new visual idea every second, each teeming with energy, pitch-dark comedy, and inspired cinematic lunacy.

There is something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened (as far as I know) is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision.

Cowards is paradoxically retrograde and ultramodern. Its sexual playfulness and brazen lo-fi effect shots suggest a full-tilt Michel Gondry remake of 1920s pornography. Its hectic, stuttering cutting patterns are as much a throwback to the experimental Soviet montage of Vertov as they are a reflection of the glitched-out world of digital editing and DVD-R.

The plot of this puréed Feuillade serial verily drips with Grecian formula, as sordid family secrets spawn unintentional murders. Maddin fixates on his characters' uncontrollable desires, providing room for alternately poignant and explosive slo-mo replays. Frenzied moments of impulsive violence and sexuality lend the movie the sublime naughtiness of a hand-cranked skin flick. After all, the whole thing takes place within a single drop of sperm.

It seems like Maddin's most personal project yet: the hero is a hockey player named Guy Maddin; his mother, like Maddin's, runs a beauty salon; and Maddin even casts some of his own family members. But the overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.

As ever, Maddin can pack an entire movie's worth of intrigue into five minutes, with full backstories relayed in a few seconds, working in an exhilarating shorthand that borders on the experimental.

The Winnipeg wonder's wacky wordless melodrama was exhibited as a peepshow installation in Rotterdam. Here is a splendidly sordid story of wily, wicked women luring innocent young ice hockey players into dens of unspeakable iniquity and dirty deeds involving hand transplants and other stuff of that ilk. Like a deranged silent serial shot through with Cold War politics and Shanghai sexuality, it's hilarious, haunting and exhilaratingly inventive.