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Watching The Forbidden Room (2015) is like being sprayed in the face with a cinematic hose. Each droplet is its own frame, every saturating second a standalone short film which eventually coalesces into one big, wet riff on form. It’s confusing and complex, shifting and changing directions more often than a leaf caught in a hurricane. Even trying to come up with a two-sentence synopsis of the film is daunting, and ultimately meaningless to the experience. You won’t miss anything by walking away from the film for 30 seconds, yet there’s so much you won’t see. It’s disorienting and amnesia-inducing, causing the viewer to feel much like the film’s recurring damsel, Margot (Clara Furey), the tether around which all the film’s madness seems to swirl.

But hoping to find a binding commonality underscoring the entire film is a waste - even directors Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson will attest to that. There’s no narrative, yet there’s so much to watch. The film has a few prominent “stories” within its fragmented calamity, but they don’t assist or carry one another in any obvious way. Some of the more time-consuming story bits include:

• An instructional video about how to properly prepare, enjoy, and wind down from the perfect bath, complete with tub-related jokes.
• A submarine packed with explosive jelly sits in the sea, its crew struggling to keep alive and unable to surface.
• A lumberjack travels into a cave to rescue a woman named Margot (and magically appears on board the aforementioned submarine).
• A man who lives in an elevator murders a guy to cover up forgetting his wife’s birthday.
• A doctor repairs 47 broken bones on a woman and is assaulted by females in skeleton unitards and a creepy insurance salesman.
• A boy wears a fake mustache to assume his deceased father’s role in the household, to his blind mother’s delight.
• A girl with amnesia is somehow involved with an aswang.
• Someone stole a squid.

The film’s structure stacks, where one situation morphs into another, and another, and so on, until eventually backtracking to the beginning, by which time the viewer had completely forgotten where the insanity started. Each “segment,” if segments can even be discerned, brings things back to the submarine and the lumberjack. But that’s not to say the lumberjack-damsel love story is the film’s focus - if anything, it’s the filmmakers jabbing the cliché. After all, a montage of massive events called “The Book of Climaxes” happens right before the lumberjack finally gets the girl, rendering his achievement limp and uninteresting.

The film ends leaving the viewer disoriented and majorly WTF-ified, yet somehow satisfied and contemplative. It’s very long, feels even longer, and all of that is exactly the film’s intent.

Everything else aside, the short answer is no. The Forbidden Room doesn’t have a linear story, and if it did (or, if it does in the minds of the auteurs responsible for the esoteric film), it doesn’t matter. The film doesn’t exist to tell a story that can be summarized with words. It exists as art, as a majestic and surrealist exhibition of bygone cinematic references smashed into the same dough and baked into an incredibly well-crafted loaf of dementia.