The Forbidden Room (2015) on Netflix
A submarine crew carries a substance that would explode if the boat ever surfaced, so the men stay deep while the air runs thin. A woodsman called Cesare forces his way aboard.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb6.2/103,625 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
The men of a submarine crew are transporting a volatile substance that would blow up if the vessel ever came to the surface, and they stay below while the oxygen supply runs low. Moving through a labyrinth of rooms and passageways, they try to reach the captain's chamber. A woodsman named Cesare appears on board unannounced, and the crew believe his arrival may lead to a way out. As they go, the men tell stories, and those stories open into others, layering one inside the next. Among them are sapling-jacks attempting to rescue Margot from kidnappers, a surgeon taken by women skeletons who work as insurance defrauders, and a madman on a train in the charge of a womanizing psychiatrist.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Forbidden Room (2015)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- After its Sundance premiere, The Forbidden Room was re-edited because the soundtracks on the DCP were out of synch with each other; co-director Guy Maddin called it "a nightmare" and said the film had been too long even for him.
- So much material was cut from The Forbidden Room that the directors turned it into a web series called Seances, which Guy Maddin calls a "companion piece" to the film.
- Galen Johnson created 500 intertitles for the film, roughly 400 of which remain in the final edit; because it was a Canadian production he also redid each one in French, bringing his total work to at least 800 intertitles.
- The band Sparks contributed the song "The Final Derriere" for their appearance in the film as the Faceless Crooner, and Maddin said it was recorded within a few hours of him and Johnson asking them to do it.
- For some of the tracks on the score, composer Galen Johnson baked LP records and then recorded the results, using them as the basis for compositions; he wrote the film's music with Guy Maddin, trading files for mutual input.
- The Forbidden Room was shot on digital in public studios at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Centre PHI in Montreal, where the public could visit and attend the film shoots.
