Critic Reviews

• Tom Huddleston, Time Out

  Still too self-referential, too hermetic and too glacial to offer much enjoyment beyond the gorgeous monochrome visuals.

• Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

  Patric's performance is a deadpan treat. His can-do, take-charge character is in continual zany contrast to his surreal surroundings.

• Ty Burr, Boston Globe

  'Keyhole" is the first Guy Maddin movie that feels as if it got only halfway out of the director's head and onto the screen.

• J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader

  Funny enough to be disarming even when it's spinning its wheels thematically.

• Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

  A Maddin film has a disturbing way of always seeming to exist in the present, like a dream. You know what happened and you even know what will happen, but you also see it all shifting and changing.

• Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

  Like Maddin's melancholic and relatively more conventional My Winnipeg, Keyhole is about a memory house, but one that is even more fragmented, mythical and elusive.

• Wally Hammond, Little White Lies

  A bravura journey into a noirish nightmare world and a lock that even paid-up Maddinites won't be able to pick on a single viewing.

• Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

  Strangled by its own nostalgic mad love.

• Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

  Maddin has always been something of an acquired taste - and he seems to be doing his utmost to keep it that way.

• Jennifer Tate, ViewLondon

  This rousing and tormented monochrome tale of a deadbeat gangster making an unusual odyssey through his haunted home is sordid, sinister and bafflingly brilliant.

• Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall

  While it's playfully inventive, it's also aggravatingly elusive

• Emma Simmonds, The List

  Keyhole is an enchantment of chiaroscuro compositions which float across the screen like a dream; it's an acquired taste but pure cinema nevertheless.

• Ian Freer, Empire Magazine

  A peculiar film rich with varying tones and styles. It's not hard to see why Maddin has been deemed Canada's answer to David Lynch.

• Carmen Gray, Total Film

  Though self-referential to a fault, the deadpan humour, frayed logic and monochrome dazzle cast their own richly peculiar spell.

• Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

  Maddin bathes it in his usual weirdness.

• Brian Orndorf, BrianOrndorf.com

  It's an exhausting feature, richly made yet punishing and baffling in a manner that doesn't invite further discussion. I suppose Maddin fans wouldn't want it any other way.

• Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

  The film is creepy, depraved and often funny and Maddin's most perverse outing since "Tales from the Gimli Hospital," but although it compels through most of its running time, it doesn't quite sustain through the home stretch.

• Brent Simon, Shockya.com

  Characteristically full of some beautiful and evocative images, Maddin's latest film seems doggedly intent on achieving art status merely through obfuscation.

• Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

  Think of "Keyhole" as an avant-garde melodrama to cleanse you palate of all of the insipid Hollywood crap you've ever seen over the years. You need it.

Read all 19 critic reviews