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Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room (2015) doesn’t tell a story. Instead, it tells dozens of them, all of which culminate into essentially nothing but take the viewer on a delusional, morphing journey through imagination, nightmares, and the history of cinema. Its structure is regularly compared to a Russian nesting doll, constantly burrowing within itself until its origin is forgotten, then retracing its steps to remind you where it started.

A few components of the film are revisited; there’s a soon-to-explode submarine full of men, and a woodsman rescuing a damsel (Margot!) from a band of cave-dwelling people. The rest of the film is dozens of short, chaotic insanities that don’t whatsoever relate to the submarine crew or the woman, yet allegedly do. Moments transition from one to the next with seemingly no connection, each justifying itself by a thread-thick qualification that is all the film requires to keep going.

The Forbidden Room is composed of layers that aren’t really layers, like removing an orange peel to reveal an onion, peeling that to find an apple, and slicing it to reveal the pit of a peach. The stacking structure exists to reward the viewer for sitting through its slow and delusional unravel. As CBS puts it, the film “can only be described as a product of alchemy—a head trip composed of imagery that blurs, morphs and congeals like roiling chemicals, deteriorating nitrate film stock, or the ectoplasm that mediums conjured during séances. They’re wisps of memories of films rather than films themselves.”

It feels like Maddin had dozens of ideas for two-minute short films and collected them all into a single piece, not concerned with building much connective tissue. For instance: a hazy and puddle-like short story about an ostler (Mathieu Almaric) and his mother (Charlotte Rampling) and their pharmacist (Udo Kier) is told by a man under attack from his doppelganger Lug Lug, a snarling Nosferatu-type born out of the man’s obsession with the two-faced god Janus, the bust of whom he tried to gift his girlfriend, within a tale about a demolished childhood brought to light by a German psychiatrist traveling on an impossible Berlin-Bogota railway, all of which was the dream of a mustache on the face of a butler murdered by his boss, a mustache his blind wife makes their child son wear, and the mustachio man’s boss collects taxidermied animals, lives inside an elevator and committed the murder because he forgot his wife’s birthday, but then it becomes his own birthday, all of which is a story told by an aswang banana resting on the bed of an amnesiac girl, which is the dream of a woodsman’s travel companion, all of which is the “memory” of one of the men on a submarine who are busy trying to suck extra oxygen out of flapjacks.

That extremely grotesque sentence is evidence of why zero critical reviews of The Forbidden Room attempt to explain the plot. In fact, the best non-description may be by Daniel Goodwin on HeyUGuys, saying, “The Forbidden Room is a grueling, mad parody of film/ art interpretation that is almost impossible to critique. It’s like spending two hours going mad in Willy Wonka’s chocolate tunnel, and while there’s no way of knowing which direction you are going, the dangers remain evident.”

By the time the Matryoshka doll that has been opening for 45 minutes reverses itself, one totally forgets where (or why) it started in the first place. The reason likely doesn’t exist—it just did, and it took you for the journey whether you wanted to tag along or not.

The film is a dark and complex collection of scenes that simultaneously pay tribute to and mock the genres and films from which it takes inspiration. It wonderfully marries title cards with audible dialogue in the awkward fashion of the cinema’s historical transition from silents to talkies, both to aesthetic and comedic success. Every story within The Forbidden Room is based on an ancient film lost throughout time, whether due to poor storage, fire, or decomposition, even if all that existed for Maddin and Evan Johnson to work with was a title. They cleverly recreate the look and the feel of decaying film, warped stock and Technicolor two-strip, combining endless genre styles from classic noir, German expressionism, and silent Hollywood with imaginative fables and tableaus into a big, weird phantasm with little precedent. There are serious scenes and dark moments juxtaposed with fart jokes, squid theft, and a whole musical number about a man undergoing repeated lobotomies in an attempt to cure his obsession with pinching butts.

If all that wasn’t enough, The Forbidden Room is book-ended by a hairy-chested big man in a bathrobe (Louis Negin) providing instructions on how to properly take a bath, while occasionally chucking out great jokes (“What’s the difference between a woman in church and a woman in the bath? I’ll give you a hint - the woman in church has hope in her soul.”)

Dreams are an important part of real life. If there’s any word suitable to describe The Forbidden Room, that’s it, but in the most fractured and demented way possible. Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian said, it’s like “taking LSD and wandering around a film archive,” which is as accurate as one can get.