Keyhole – review

The independent Canadian movie-maker Guy Maddin has been ploughing his own avant-garde furrow out there in Winnipeg for some years now, and rarely more weirdly than in this parodic thriller about a gangster taking over a middle-class, midwestern household at some uncertain time in the 1930s or 40s. Specifically it invokes three Bogart classics – The Petrified Forest , Key Largo , The Desperate Hours – with twists: first the antihero is called Ulysses Pick and this is a version of the homecoming in The Odyssey ; second, the house is haunted, and half the characters are ghosts. Shot in black-and-white, Keyhole is a genuine curiosity, rather less interesting perhaps than I've made it sound, and an example of that narrow sub-genre, whimsical noir.