(what the critics say)
Nuttily wonderful. One of the year's 10 best films. Once again, Mr. Maddin has ransacked film history and his own delirious imagination to create a work like none other: a silently shot film about a man who, on revisiting his childhood home, hurtles unto a past where orphan children, coy lesbian lovers, and a mad scientist converge. Delightful!
— Manohla Dargis
Imagine all the beauty of a silent black and white film but with a modern sensibility as well as a wicked sense of humor, and you begin to get a sense of Maddin's brilliant work.
— Karen Wilson
The finest evening at Toronto 2006? The world premiere of Guy Maddin’s BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! , a comedic detour into a whirlpool of incest, lunacy, and obsession that typifies the cine-world of the wonderfully demented Winnipeg filmmaker.
— Gerald Peary
Most memorable night at the Toronto Film Festival? Has to be the world premiere of Guy Maddin's delirious silent, 'Brand upon the Brain', complete with a live orchestra, a narrator, three lab-coated foley artists to supply the sound effects, and even (allegedly) a castrato for two song sequences.
— Tom Charity
Guy Maddin's latest fever dream of a film, "Brand Upon the Brain!," descended upon the Walter Reade Theatre on October 15 to close out the New York Film Festival with a bang!
— R. Emmett Sweeny
The most joyous film at Berlin was Guy Maddin’s Brand upon the Brain! The film is passionately serious and poetic. Maker and master of his own cosmos, Maddin says he shot this film in nine days. That is three days longer than God took to create the world, but the extra 72 hours were worth it.
— Nigel Andrews
Uproariously funny and surprisingly touching. A magical experience.
— Michael Dwyer
Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin isn't known for run-of-the-mill movies, but the feature he debuted at the Toronto Fest was outrageous even for him. A silent film taking the form of a twelve-chapter Feuillade-flavored serial and designed to have live accompaniment, the movie itself is a match for any of his features to date, and could outstrip earlier efforts in the arthouse arena. To his familiar (which is not to say tired) bag of faux-vintage tricks -- the iris shots, manufactured decay, and hyper-artificial acting -- Maddin adds some newer techniques. He finds a way of integrating the flaws of digital imagemaking into an aesthetic that usually avoids any hint of the modern era, for instance: alongside his usual flash frames and jarring edits, Maddin adds the hiccupy freeze frames associated with digital playback errors.
— John DeFore
What kind of silent film is this, then? In form Maddin's film assumes the shape of a serial: the 97-minute running time is divided into twelve "chapters". In place of Pearl White's exploits or the dreamlike activities of Fantômas, we are offered the reminiscences of a character billed as Guy Maddin himself, recalling a boyhood on the island of Black Notch. Never a dull moment here: it's home to a lighthouse, an orphanage, his repressed mother with a birthmark shaped like Romania, his mad scientist of a father, and a visitation by two childhood detectives. Among the images, inspired by Maddin's love of German Expressionism, gothic horror stories, and Hollywood's pulp junkyard, a mystery looms that needs solving: why do so many orphans have wounds on their heads? Maybe the answer has something to do with the mad scientist's syringe...
— Geoff Brown
This is the film even of the year and it arrives dripping with something called Orphan Nectar.
— Grady Hendrix
Unlike anything out there.
— Lou Lumenick
The film casts a mesmerizing spell… delicious, ingenious, often very funny and strangely touching… One of the top 10 films of the year
— Manohla Dargis
An oversexed masterpiece
— Andrew Sarris
…a retro-silent thriller that might be found in Lon Chaney's basement.
— Joshua Rothkopf
It's near impossible to be this willfully weird and yet so compulsively watchable, but somehow Guy Maddin pulls it off…
— Logan Hill
Majestically strange and intermittently hilarious, it’s one of the damndest things you’ll ever see on a movie screen.
— Cliff Doerksen
It's an astonishing film: weird, obsessed, drawing on subterranean impulses, hypnotic.
— Roger Ebert
Lorem ipsum
— Test
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