Good ghosts wander the battlefields at night and keep soldiers from danger. According to Guy Maddin, the visual style of the picture was influenced by Joseph von Sternberg’s film “Bloody Empress” (1934) with its lush Russia, Peter’s clown guard and snow. In addition, Maddin used some musical fragments from "Bloody Empress" in his tape.
In addition to the techniques, the director also introduces intertitles, adjacent to dialogue and complete soundlessness, which gives a reference to the period of transition of silent cinema to sound, and goat-glanding technology, when silent paintings were added, as a rule, partially, the soundtrack, and this allowed them to be re-released as part-talkies.
The idea of the plot belongs to John Bowles Harvey, on the basis of which Guy Maddin and George Toles write the script, giving, however, the protagonist the name John Bowles, thereby paying tribute to the author of the story.
In the deformed space of Arkhangelsk, the concept of trauma appears, but in the meaning of something normal. The absence of a limb does not prevent Bowles, as well as other soldiers, from wandering into the trenches and effectively making love and war. The lieutenant’s rival, Captain Philbin, suffers from amnesia as a result of the fact that in infancy his mother weaned him from his chest, drawing a “terrible monster” on her, very reminiscent of Rasputin. Soldiers die, but not always for real, sometimes they get up and return to the trenches. Geza, a little boy, suffers from apoplexy, and his father is a pathological coward. Trauma becomes a sign of the natural existence of people in the context of war, and, quite understandably, makes memory changeable and selective. Amnesia, as one of the main motives of the film, is based on the inability to identify even the objects of his affection, which leads to a changeable, like the front line, the love line.
The plot develops against the backdrop of hostilities, where the armies of the world participate against the Kaiser and the Huns (this globalism will find its development in “The Saddest Music in the World”), and along with men, of which there are not so many, women and children fight. One of the strangest and most fascinating scenes is a wave of white rabbits falling on soldiers waiting for an enemy attack. Like Alice's upside-down adventures, only instead of her own pursuit of an inevitable burrow drop, the burrows themselves spew rabbits with all the attendant consequences.
The trenches in which soldiers are waiting for an attack resemble the exaggerated hall of the UN General Assembly, where gramophones play music from different countries, and an Orthodox priest next to a banner talks quietly with an African shaman about something. War equalizes all denominators.
The myth of the lost lover is introduced into the context of the collapse of European civilization. However, now it is not enough to go down to hell, the more it happens around, now, having lost memory, you need to go there repeatedly, each time discovering a new reality and even a new lover, and the exit from hell does not guarantee happiness - the great illusion of found peace is crumpled by a war that never ends.
A strange conglomeration of modern laughter culture, Brecht’s grotesque and the paradoxical visual magnetism of the First World War leave a full sense of tragedy. No one will emerge victorious from the continuous battle of Eros and Thanatos, because Arkhangelsk with its eternal twilight brings only oblivion, and every time you get out to the semi-mythical Murmansk, where the best hotel for the newlyweds is located, you inevitably get back.