TIFF Review: Brand Upon The Brain!

At the Elgin Theater last Friday, Guy Maddin's newest film, Brand Upon the Brain, started 20 minutes late. The delay was, in fact, understandable: The Toronto world premiere of the film involved an 11-piece orchestra, live foley artists, a narrator and a singer. Introducing the film, Maddin summed it up: "... everything you hear tonight will be originating from these four walls." Catnip to film aficionados and proud Canadians both -- an audacious recreation of the silent film experience for a modern audience.

And there were still problems: The first few minutes of the film ran without music, a false start that had to be backed up. It was a mistake, but it was a welcome one. Without Jason Staczeky's score, Maddin's cuts and images were discordant, elusive, aggravating; with the weighty sweep of strings and the heartbeat of percussion accompanying the second try, the same scenes played much differently. What had jumped now glided; what was shattered, part of a whole. Having the chance to watch art explain itself -- to see the point of a piece happen in front of you -- was a singular experience. It was, in fact, what everyone who was there was hoping for -- a film unique and impermanent, one that would never be seen like this again.


Brand Upon the Brain tells the story of Guy (Eric Steffen Maahs), who's returned to his family's ancestral home at his mother's behest. The family estate is an old lighthouse and orphanage, and Guy's mother wants it to be painted one last time. As Guy applies paint, the memories flow -- he recalls his youth in the lighthouse, a sealed environment disturbed by the arrival of teen detectives Wendy and Chance Hale (both played by Katherine E. Scharhon). It seems there is a mystery on the island -- and within the heart of everyone around young Guy (Sullivan Brown).

Maddin's films have always played like dreams, and Brand Upon the Brain! is no exception; it's also a little overlong. Guy's falling back and forth between the past and present starts to become a bit of a metronome, and the beat goes on too long. But even so, Maddin (much like Del Toro does in Pan's Labyrinth) has created a world of pure imagination -- a fairy tale with the darkness and light of youth and the hopes and fears of adulthood; a mix of Peter Pan and Nosferatu. Brand Upon the Brain! isn't Madden's best film, or his most accessible -- but last Friday night, Maddin gave a crowded theater a singular collective experience -- and that, in itself, left a impression on everyone there as firm and fierce as the promise and threat of the title of the film that had just blazed across us like lightning, accompanied by sound and thunder.