Careful

Few directors deserve the epithet "unique," but Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is one of them; one can't mistake his work for that of anyone else. Slyly borrowing techniques from silent and early sound cinema, Maddin transplants the essence of early film aesthetics onto weird melodramatic plots that are unmistakably his own. Deconstructing melodrama, Maddin plays with aural and temporal concerns to create a timeless screen universe that is as strange and arresting as the oddball characters who inhabit the Maddin iconography.

In the mythical mountain village of Tolzbad, silence is golden: the residents cringe in fear of avalanches. Metaphorically, the anxiety ab...