Cowards Bend the Knee (64 mins, 2003)- by Guy Maddin

Starring Winnipeg Actors: Darcy Fehr, Vic Cowie, Melissa Dionisio, Jon Ted Wynne, Mike Bell, David Evans

Jam-packed with enough kinetically photographed action to seem like a never-ending cliff-hanger, Guy Maddin’s tremendous Cowards Bend the Knee is a Feuillade serial ultra-condensed and blenderised, as ghostwritten by Euripides. 

If fiction is sometimes barely disguised autobiography, Cowards is its mirror image, twisted and poisoned wish-fulfillment: the mythomaniacal Maddin casts “himself” (actually, Darcy Fehr) as a hockey sniper made lily-livered by mother and daughter femme fatales, and resurrects his father as the team’s radio broadcaster and his own romantic antagonist. 

Set in a shadow-suffused hockey arena and a Mabuse-like beauty salon-slash-abortion clinic lined with two-way mirrors, the plot drips with the Grecian formula, as sordid family secrets spawn unintentional murder most foul.

Veering into penny dreadful territory with the introduction of a vengeful ghost and uncontrollable extremities as windows into the unconscious, Maddin evokes the expressionist classic The Hands of Orlac, and channels the editing style of Austrian avant-gardist Martin Arnold; Maddin fixates on his character’s groping and fisting expressionist paws, bathing them in ethereal light and chopping them into dazzling, iris-heavy micro-montages. 

Room to pant is provided by slo-mo replays, alternately poignant and explosive: lurid, frenzied moments of impulsive violence and carnivorous sexuality lend this bewitchingly onanistic work the sublime naughtiness of an antique hand-cranked skin flick.  It all takes place, after all, within a drop of sperm. 

Originally presented as an installation in ten peepholes at Toronto’s Power Plant gallery and the 2003 Rotterdam Film Festival (where it won a special mention from the FIPRESCI jury), and now receiving its Canadian theatrical debut, Cowards demands serious consideration as a major work of art by Canada’s most self-deluded cinephile.

“The murky ambience, and even some of the motifs, suggest early-'30s horror films like The Mystery of the Wax Museum or Mad Love.”  J. Hoberman, The Village Voice