Maddin firmly stands on the familiar ground of family conflicts and difficult relationships in triangles, the complex geometry of which fits not into love, but into a pathological passion, the way out of which is almost always possible only in death or forgetting. The aesthetics of early cinema and modern, postmodern themes, including cruel irony, the simultaneous existence in one modality of different types of the real. On the familiar Maddin viewer sites again meet the beauty salon, which is both a brothel and an abortion; hockey box; museum of wax figures (hello Paulo Leni); dead characters eager to return to the world of the living and indecisive hero Guy Maddin, at the same time Son, a hockey player, a failed lover, a child without qualities, and an indispensable citizen of Canada.
As in his early works, he makes a journey into the past - his own and cinema, without forgetting, of course, about music. There is no specially written soundtrack in the film, and Maddin makes a compilation, where, along with the crackling of an old film projector and poorly preserved film, Chopin, Schumann, Wagner and Beethoven are present on one sound canvas.
Eroticism, not covered up, still remains repressed. The inability to perform the act with any of the changing lovers appeals to Buñuel's "Golden Age," Maddin's direct antecedent.
The film is based on the Greek tragedy, the myth of Electra, the conductor is the film “Hands of Orlac” by Robert Wien. As in the classic film, the protagonist's own hands dominate his personality. In general, the hands become an extremely expressive element, not only the protagonist, but also the rest of the story, the camera closely follows the gestures; on the general, rather vague background, emphasizing the viewer’s attention with close-ups and endless fixations on the repeated movements of the hands and fingers. The impossibility of natural touching a father or a beloved woman, legitimizing taboo gestures, stroking an ice chest instead of a real one, become a metaphor for the perverse relationship between the characters.
In addition to the allusions already mentioned, one can recall, for a more complete sense of the postmodern layering of the picture, the 1927 film by Tod Browning “Unknown”, from which the story of the interaction of Guy and Meta is partially taken, as well as the scene of “eating” Guy Meta’s fingers, almost identical to the scene in the “Golden Age”. In the relationship of Maddin the Elder and Guy, there is a story (according to the director) from the story of I. S. Turgenev “First Love”, where the main character fails in the romantic competition of his father.
The structure of the film refers, firstly, to the era of single-parts, and secondly, to the Edison kinetoscope. The fact is that the film is conceived as an installation and, according to the director, the film in ten parts was supposed to be shown in one part in one of ten peepholes, and the audience sequentially moved from one peephole to another. Thus, only one spectator could observe one small part, engaging in what looked like a safe and aseptic act of voyeur.
