"To me, looking at a Guy Maddin film is like looking at an Easter egg that's been hollowed out, and when you peek in you see this whole other world... He's like Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel and Orson Welles all rolled into one child-like man." - Shelley Duval 

From the first frame of Guy Maddin's fourth and most accessible feature, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, you're transported to an entirely convincing, hermetically sealed fantasy world, a twisted Garden of Eden.  

Peter Glahn, a political prisoner returns to his homeland, Mandragora, after several hard years of incarceration. Mandragora is a dream-struck, surrealist place where the sun never sets and the inhabitants live in perpetual moral twilight, ruled by their libidinal desires. En route home, Peter meets and falls desperately in love with the enigmatic Juliana (played with regal bearing by the tragically beautiful and always mysterious Pascale Bussieres). 

Peter arrives home to find a veritable la ronde of romance and desire brewing among the darkness-deprived Mandragorans. His ostrich-farming sister, Amelia (played with a deliciously bruised pathological neediness by Shelley Duvall) is sick with heartache and blinded by passion for the wicked mesmerist, Dr. Solti.  

R.H. Thomson brings a gleeful repugnance to Dr. Solti, who greedily seeks the favours of both Juliana and Zephir (Alice Krige), a fisherman's widow. Alice Krige is all smouldering passion as the nymphomanical Zephir, making her dangerous and almost irresistable.  

As the sun-addled Mandragorans somnambulate through their endless days, passions heat up as their amore goes unrequited. Soon it all becomes too much to bear...  

John Dippong