Writer/director Guy Maddin is far gone into the idea of movies as a “dream state”. Few others come close. His second feature is an eerie adoption of the otherworldly texture of silent films and early talkies. The weathered nitrate frames. The precarious sound. The careful master shots of a time when film cameras were unwieldy tanks. Down to the analog specks, stains, splotches and splices, its detail is obsessive. Only the sonic fidelity and the unhinged violence gives this away as not a product of 1929. It’s no cinematic party trick, either. In Maddin’s hands, the style is the most beautiful vessel for his tragedy. He steals like all artists steal, but also gives back more than he takes. This film trips and slips into other dimensions and spills all of its marbles and never picks ’em up. The three pivotal characters all have problems with reality. There’s the traumatized World War I soldier who becomes convinced that his dead wife is still alive after he sees a woman who reminds him of her. There’s the other soldier who suffers from chronic memory loss so severe that he forgets that he’s married mere minutes after his wedding. Between them is a woman (the latter’s wife and the former’s obsession) who goes through her own spell of amnesia that REALLY twists up everything that we thought we knew. Like most dreams though, there’s no tight logic here. There’s not much of a math equation to solve, but there is a theme—and it’s LOVE. Painful, painful love. Love as the thing most likely to save you and the thing most likely to kill you. You’ve seen it before and now see it here, as a fuzzy, black-and-white phantom of a film that, like some of its characters, holds close some things that everyone knows are long gone.