TIFF Review: KEYHOLE

Some films should earn you a merit badge.

Guy Maddin was in the house to introduce KEYHOLE this weekend, and he started off by telling us that “This is the autobiography of a house”. Interesting. Maddin presented a theory that when people move out of a home, all of the joy and all of the happy memories are taken with them. On the other hand, all of the sadness and all of the pain remains. Thus, he presents an “If these walls could talk…” yarn.

But sweet lord is this yarn ever weird!

The movie starts off like a piece of pulp fiction, but gives a glimmer of the oddity to come with lines like:

“Everybody against the wall! Anyone who’s alive – face the wall. Anyone who’s dead – face me.”

Wait, what?

I was sitting with Courtney Small and Matthew Price for this showing, and round fifteen minutes in or so I think all three of us knew we were in that movie. The one that is nothing like what you had in mind, and will inevitably weave back & forth between weird and bad. Where it inevitably lands is up for debate, but for my money it nestles nicely on the side of the latter. Many of the images play like someone’s nightmare; a nightmare where you’re never entirely sure what’s happening, or even if you’re asleep or awake. That’s not always a bad thing, but the unfocused nature of KEYHOLE makes it a bit of a task.

While it’s clear that I didn’t like this film, I was never bored – far from it my friends! It’s impossible to be bored by a movie that throws out glorious gumshoe dialogue like “You’re all froth and no beer”. It’s also impossible to get bored by a film that includes such weird  lines as “That penis is getting dusty” (Really). If that penis was in fact dusty, it was taken care of when the ghost of a weird, old, naked man decided to go down on it (Yes, really).

Oh, sorry, had I not mentioned the weird, old, naked man yet? My apologies, but believe it or not, he was just a part of the weirdness of this film. There’s a stuffed wolverine with a gun in its mouth, there’s a plant that needs to be watered by tears, a bathtub that three people crowd into, and there’s a twenty-something guy continually masturbating in a cupboard (and whenever we find him someone in the film declares “Yahtzee!”).

All that was missing was an introduction by Count Floyd.

In a perfect world, I see this film getting an odd cult following down the road the way HAUSU has one now. But in the meantime, I’m just gonna wash my eyes out with soap and try to forget about the old, weird, naked guy.