Main Cast: Kyle McCulloch, Michael Gottli, Angela Heck, Margaret Anne McLeod, Caroline Bonner
Release Year: 1988
Country: CA
Run Time: 72 minutes
Plot
Set in a makeshift hospital that seems to exist somewhere between Scandinavia and what could be a parallel universe, Tales From the Gimli Hospital is Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's surreal, black & white first feature. The film cleverly uses its own low-budget origin as a strength by re-visioning the techniques of the silent film era and early "talkies". During a visit to their dying mother in present-day Gimli Hospital, two children are subjected by their grandmother to a long, convoluted story concerning Ainar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch) and his friend Gunnar (Michael Gottli). Thus we are transported back in time to a Gimli Hospital of the past, where Ainar and Gunnar, two patients sharing what seems to be the hospital's only room, compete for the attention of the Gimli nurses by telling stories which get progressively more complicated and bizarre as the rivalry between them escalates. They are also treated to puppet shows by the nurses, and they take time out for tree bark fish-cutting and, appropriately enough, tree bark fish appreciation. Tales From the Gimli Hospital has an off-kilter logic and sense of humor all its own and is comparable to David Lynch's Eraserhead in its ability to create in the viewer's mind the pervasive feeling that we are trapped in someone else's dream. ~ Anthony Reed, All Movie Guide
Review
Guy Maddin's debut feature establishes the otherworldly, unfamiliar quality that he obsessively cultivates in later movies, albeit in different forms. Dreamlike or nightmarish depending on your taste, this black-and-white reverie creates a world seemingly unencumbered by Maddin's self-consciousness. The dreary, timeless Canadian backwoods that the film is set in appears to have sprung intact right out of Maddin's id, which in turn seems to have been deeply influenced by folklore, myth, and, most importantly, cinema. Surreal and distanced, Tales From the Gimli Hospital is more concerned with eliciting laughter through its clever use of the medium's formal and technical elements, rather than expressing or exploring distinct ideas. With its hissing soundtrack and hallucinatory black-and-white, one can almost imagine the film as a recently excavated sample from a forgotten genre. Even at its 72-minute clip, Tales From the Gimli Hospital might strike some viewers as overlong and laborious. For all its perversity, the movie doesn't quite sustain its oddball singularity. Before it's over, the novelty of the film's look and sound and Maddin's peculiar sense of humor fades, and monotony sets in. Wildly uneven, if undeniably inventive, the movie stands as a fitting introduction to one of the more unusual voices in world cinema. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
The film opens on two young children whose mother is dying in the present-day Gimli hospital. During a visit to see her, the children's Icelandic grandmother launches into the grim and convoluted tale of Einar the Lonely, a patient in a far-distant-past version of the same hospital—in "a Gimli we no longer know," as the grandmother puts it. The rest of the film consists of Einar's story. In it, Einar (Kyle McCulloch) succumbs to a smallpox epidemic and is admitted to the Gimli hospital for treatment, where he meets his neighbor Gunnar (Michael Gottli). While both are at first pleased to have a friend nearby in their time of illness, the two men soon begin competing for the attentions and affections of the hospital's beautiful young nurses by telling their own increasingly strange and convoluted stories—a competition at which the hapless Einar is at a major disadvantage, and it soon becomes clear that the Gimli nurses (in particular the angelic Snjofrieder, played by Caroline Bonner) favor the more charming Gunnar. However, it is only when the two men begin exchanging late-night confidences, and a terrible secret is revealed, that their friendship is irrevocably destroyed, and tragic consequences ensue.
