ALFF Program - Keyhole

Friday, February 10 at 4:00pm

Dir. Guy Maddin
Manitoba, 2011, 105 minutes

A gangster and deadbeat father, Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric), returns home after a long absence. He is toting two teenagers: a drowned girl, Denny, who has mysteriously returned to life; and a bound-and-gagged hostage, who is actually his own teenage son, Manners. Confused Ulysses doesn’t recognize his own son, but he feels with increasing conviction he must make an indoor odyssey from the back door of his home all the way up, one room at a time, to the marriage bedroom where his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) awaits. The movie is loosely based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” but with all the action transplanted indoors—a domestic Odyssey across carpets and floors, into and out of rooms, instead of across the sea. Here in the old family home the film can poetically study the emotionally complex importance of the house, and all the memories that haunt every nook and cranny of our childhood domiciles.

Winner of the Borsos Competition for best Canadian feature at the 2011 Whistler Film Festival.