Careful is a curiosity, fashioned and ornamented by its own artifice. Cinema claims it as a mode of poetic expression, an Guy Maddin undertakes a reworking of the incest theme and motifs from psychoanalysis, which he employs as ironic props through dreams. The town of Tolzbad is tottering on the edge of a precipice, in the belief that at any moment a noise might trigger an avalanche. In the village, the plotlines based on incestuous desire and family resentments intersect. Maddin deliberately links two approaches. His aesthetic abounds with references to German Expressionism (freaky, Caligari-style decor, lonely figures lost in the landscape, as in Murnau), he reformulates contemplative features from the silent era (intertitles, colour filters). The ethereal treatment of the tints with predominating hues of yellow and blue and luminous haloes completes the surrealistic rendering of this universe. The fascination with the novels of Victor Hugo, (The Man Who Laughs being a project of Maddin’s) and with Romanticism in general, creates baroque contrasts. Then a prevailing sense of distance transforms from within the poetic framework of the surface. The violence mutates into gory comic Gothic (fingers amputated, lips scorched shut). The false perspectives, the papier-mâché decorations, the offbeat post-synchronised soundtrack, creating by turns a sense of the strange and the incongruous, all relieve the subject of its gravity while maintaining the singular dream-like feel. Run through with ghosts and crystalline reflections, Careful is like a pulsating story, a difficult undertaking in which the author attempts to preserve the magic by displaying his process and presenting as timeless, figures from times past. Film as artifice.

Pierre Berthomieu, “Positif ”, n. 423, May 1996