Desire Threatens to Bring Everything Down

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MOVIE REVIEWS
Careful
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Genre: Comedy, Drama, Horror, Romance
Year Released: 1992, 2026 Blu-ray
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director: Guy Maddin
Writers: Guy Maddin, George Toles
Cast: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale, Paul Cox, Victor Cowie, Michael O'Sullivan, Vince Rimmer, Katya Gardner, Jackie Burroughs
Where to Watch: available now; order your copy here: www.kinolorber.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: Some movies recreate an older period of filmmaking by carefully imitating its appearance. CAREFUL feels like someone found a forgotten movie from another era, left it buried for decades, and discovered that everyone inside had completely lost their minds. Guy Maddin’s 1992 film borrows heavily from silent cinema, German Expressionism, early melodrama, and European mountain films, but calling it an homage barely explains what’s happening. Maddin doesn’t simply copy those influences. He twists them into something funny, uncomfortable, sexually charged, and proudly ridiculous.

That makes CAREFUL fascinating to look at almost immediately, but it also introduces the film’s biggest obstacle. Maddin is so committed to an intentionally artificial style that connecting with the story can take considerably longer than appreciating the images. Characters speak and behave like exaggerated figures from a century-old melodrama, emotions are pushed well beyond anything resembling normal human behavior, and logic regularly gives way to whatever strange idea fits the moment. You either start operating on the movie’s wavelength or spend 100 minutes wondering exactly what you walked into.

The fictional Alpine village of Tolzbad provides a wonderfully absurd foundation. Its residents live beneath mountains where even a loud noise could supposedly trigger an avalanche, so children are taught to whisper, animals are kept quiet, and everyone moves through life with exaggerated caution. The premise is funny before Maddin does anything else with it, especially because the village’s obsession with controlling sound is paired with people who are spectacularly incapable of controlling themselves. They may whisper their words, but nearly every suppressed desire seems ready to explode.

Brothers Johann (Brent Neale) and Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) are among the young men being trained in this culture of discipline, including lessons at a bizarre school for aspiring butlers. Their lives gradually become tangled with Klara (Sarah Neville), Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska), Count Knotgers (Paul Cox), and a collection of family members with enough forbidden desires to make Tolzbad far more dangerous than any avalanche. Incest, jealousy, murder, suicide, romantic obsession, and family resentment pile on top of one another until the story begins resembling an especially disturbed soap opera performed with the seriousness of ancient tragedy.

That contrast produces much of the comedy. Maddin and co-writer George Toles aren’t presenting these taboos with a straight face so much as taking the extreme emotional logic of old melodramas and seeing how far they can push it. Toles and Maddin have discussed CAREFUL as a deliberate reaction to serious films dealing with incest and abuse at the time, using provocation rather than respectable drama to approach the subject. Knowing that intention doesn’t make every uncomfortable moment easier to process, but it does clarify why the movie repeatedly pushes its relationships somewhere most filmmakers wouldn’t dare go.

The performances understand exactly what kind of movie they’re occupying. McCulloch is particularly good at maintaining an almost painfully proper exterior while Grigorss becomes increasingly trapped by desires that have no place inside Tolzbad’s rules. Neale brings a similarly heightened quality to Johann, while Neville and Dobrowolska embrace characters whose romantic behavior would feel completely absurd if anyone attempted to play it naturally. Nobody does. Every gesture, stare, declaration, and reaction belongs to Maddin’s deliberately manufactured world.

Still, I’m not convinced the story always earns as much attention as the presentation surrounding it. The various family relationships and shifting obsessions become messy, and there are stretches where understanding precisely who desires whom feels less important than simply accepting that practically everybody in Tolzbad wants someone they absolutely shouldn’t. That’s clearly part of the joke, but the repetition can create distance. I admired what Maddin was doing throughout CAREFUL more consistently than I cared about where the characters were heading.

Visually, however, it’s difficult to look away. Maddin and cinematographer Mike Marshall experiment with heavily manipulated color, deep shadows, blown-out highlights, artificial scenery, and compositions that often resemble hand-tinted images from early cinema. Maddin has described the process behind some of the film’s color photography as an attempt at “Repressovision,” overexposing footage before bringing it back down to suppress the color. Whatever terminology you use, the result is an intentionally unnatural world where reds, yellows, blues, and greens can overwhelm the people standing inside them.

That makes Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray especially welcome. The release comes from a 4K restoration produced by Sphinx Productions using the original 16mm negative held by the TIFF Film Reference Library, and this is exactly the sort of movie where preservation matters beyond simple sharpness. The grain, unusual exposure, tinted sequences, and aggressively altered colors are part of the design, not imperfections waiting to be cleaned away. CAREFUL shouldn’t suddenly look like something photographed today, because its entire personality depends upon appearing displaced from its own time.

The disc also provides useful context for anyone trying to understand Maddin rather than simply survive him. An archival commentary with Maddin and Toles accompanies the film, while Guy Maddin’s short ODILON REDON, OR THE EYE LIKE A STRANGE BALLOON MOUNTS TOWARDS INFINITY and the feature-length documentary GUY MADDIN: WAITING FOR TWILIGHT broaden the package considerably. For a filmmaker whose choices can initially seem like random eccentricities, hearing where those ideas originate makes the strange little universe of CAREFUL easier to appreciate.

The German Expressionist connection is obvious, particularly for anyone familiar with movies such as THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, but Maddin isn’t attempting a museum-quality recreation. There are too many jokes, too much sexual absurdity, and too much awareness of filmmaking history for that. He takes techniques associated with older cinema and treats them as tools rather than sacred objects, which is why a movie released in 1992 can imitate something much older without feeling like an empty nostalgia exercise.

I also appreciate how perfectly the form matches the subject. Tolzbad is built around repression, and virtually everything about the production feels constrained or distorted in some way. People lower their voices, colors don’t behave naturally, sets look knowingly artificial, and characters follow social rules while privately entertaining increasingly outrageous thoughts. The possibility of an avalanche becomes an obvious physical representation of everything these people are trying desperately not to release.

Eventually, of course, restraint proves much harder than everyone has been taught. CAREFUL becomes increasingly chaotic as desires surface and carefully maintained relationships collapse, yet Maddin never abandons the peculiar humor established from the beginning. Death can be tragic and funny within seconds of itself, while supposedly shocking revelations sometimes arrive with such exaggerated seriousness that laughing feels like the only reasonable response.

That combination won’t work for everyone, and even at 3.5 stars, I’m not sure every piece worked for me. There’s a difference between intentionally confusing storytelling and storytelling that remains engaging through confusion, and CAREFUL occasionally lands on the wrong side of that line. Still, very few movies look, sound, or behave anything like this one, and three decades later its strangeness hasn’t been dulled by familiarity.

Maddin created a village terrified that one uncontrolled sound could bring a mountain crashing down, then populated it with people carrying emotions far more dangerous than noise. CAREFUL can be frustrating, beautiful, funny, ugly, exhausting, and completely original within the same few minutes. Even when the story loses me, the imagination behind it never does, and Kino Lorber’s restoration gives this wonderfully abnormal piece of Canadian filmmaking an appropriately strange new life.

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[photo courtesy of KINO LORBER]

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