Keyhole (2012)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Stumbling out of the theater, my friend said in a small voice, "I think that was even stranger than Hourglass Sanatorium".This one follows a cast of characters comprising a family whose given names are evocative of literary figures, ways of being, and pretty objects. Unsurprisingly, the character Ulysses is on a rambling quest to find something that may not exist at all -- an adumbrate vision of his wife Hyacinth. Oh, and all he has to do is make it from the first floor of his house to the third.March (crawl, duck, run) behind them while they are sometimes nude, scraping at things, or shaking dice (there's a joke about masturbation in here somewhere), navigating their bilious house that has a ton of locked doors and a mess of floating dust particles, which -- I'm going out on a limb -- are probably metaphor for the thickness of whatever it is that came between them.My favorite thematic preoccupation lies in Maddin's stirring portrayal of the fuzzy line between life and death, with figures floating in and out of the frame (and existence), incorporating themselves into deadly vanishing-vignettes that keep recurring, and, corporeal, positioning themselves in zones of the house and grounds that Maddin somehow conveys to the audience are "dead space".

Pros: 1. Black and white look of the film 2. Film noir setting 3. Forced nudityCons: 1. Poor acting 2. Blurred story 3. Over the top noir moniker, poorly executed 4. Poorly done artistic visions 5. Forced nudityKeyhole is a dead, boring, dreadful "art" movie that fails to entertain. Dull to the point of wanting to poke your eyes out, you're left wondering who finances horrendous disasters like this one. The setting is probably the only redeeming quality of this movie. Avoid unless you dig the "artsy" type of movies. And avoid if you don't like the uncalled for nudity from male and female cast that are supposed to build the artistic integrity of this film, and yet come out as WTF(!?) moments in the movie.

I love unusual films, B&W films, cryptic films, film noir, gangster films, David Lynch films, and while this tries to be most of the aforementioned rolled into one, it is just bad beyond words. Swinging lights and cameras, bizarre cutaways, pseudo-meaningful narration.. Mix in a big name or two for 'star power'. Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. I can't believe this film was commissioned. Dialogue that you wouldn't even find in a cheap b-movie. Ghosts. Rattling chains. Gangsters. Dream sequence logic but not really ever engaging in any meaningful way. And I normally love movies like this! I like movies you have to work at to understand, this one makes me not want to even bother.Just atrocious. Made want to stop watching movies, period. I have to wait a while and put on some real movies to get the bad taste of this one out of my system. Really... that bad. I considered two stars then I watched a little more and I wished I could give a zero.

Does anybody remember the awful student film that showed in the movie "Private Parts"? Cinematic genius compared to this. People wandering around naked with no real purpose, lots of moaning, and the only way to fully understand what was going on, was a voice-over explaining each scene. That's this film in a nutshell. I guarantee the votes are going to drop exponentially until it gets the 2 it deserves.I get the concept, it's like a college Avant Garde, or an attempt at a college Avant Garde film, trying to retell "The Odyssey". But suck is still suck, regardless of the source material. Highbrow critics will swear this is great cinema, but in their attempt to seem above us, they are hitching their star to a wagon without wheels.