Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 13/9/2012)

Maddin may have been challenged by a producer to make a genre movie. Yet, for all the ghosts and gangsters packed into an old dark house, this delirious psychosexual melodrama owes much more to the unholy Jean trinity of Cocteau, Vigo and Genet than any studio journeyman. Lurking shades of James Whale are evident, as are nods to Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and George Kuchar. But this is unmistakably a Guy Maddin film and, while it may not be as inspired as his silent masterpiece Careful (1993) or as amusing as his cod-autobiography My Winnipeg (2007), it still makes a fine companion piece to another stylised Depression saga, The Saddest Music in the World (2003).

As a gun battle rages with cops surrounding a house in an unnamed city, sidekick Daniel Enright wonders what is keeping gang boss Jason Patric. He ordered them to kidnap twentysomething David Wontner, who now sits bound and gagged in a corner as Kevin McDonald, Theodoros Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, Jorge Requena, David Evans, Brent Neale and the palookaish Mike Bell fight a desperate rearguard action, while the sharply suited Claude Dorgo urges the ambitious Enright to keep his thoughts to himself and his focus on the job in hand.

Eventually, Patric arrives soaked from a torrential downpour and carrying drowning victim Brooke Palsson, whose condition miraculously appears to improve the moment she gets indoors. He fails to recognise Wontner as his sole surviving son, but knows he is home after a prolonged absence and seems unwilling to heed the eerily whispered warning of father-in-law Louis Negin, who is chained naked to the bed of his daughter Isabella Rossellini, who is sick and ensconced in an upper room with Chinese lover Johnny Chang and is highly reluctant to reacquaint herself with the spouse she has not seen in an age and who now consorts with French-speaking moll Olivia Rameau.

Patric has summoned doctor Udo Kier, who has come directly from the hospital having witnessed the death of his young son. But, while he wishes to examine both Rossellini and Palsson, events out of his control keep intervening. Leaving Dorgo to redecorate the room so it looks as he remembered it, Patric takes Palsson and Wontner up the stairs, as he needs their help to negotiate his path to Rossellini. He keeps peeping through keyholes in the hope of finding her and discovers that strands of his wife's hair open various doors. But nothing is straightforward and Patric needs to uncover secret passages (one of which contains an unexplained phallic lever) and tormenting memories before he can reach his goal.

There is little point in trying to describe what happens next - partly because that is an almost impossible task and partly because this is a film whose sequences, symbolism and subtext defy precise interpretation. Moreover, it is also a work that has to be seen without much foreknowledge, as the experience of trying to fathom what is going on while being bombarded with a befuddling fusillade of glistening digital monochrome images (and the occasional flash of colour) is all the more rewarding as the pieces fall into vaguely the right place and a semblance of understanding begins to emerge.

Suffice to say, the performances are splendidly spirited, with Patric sportingly guying his own image in riffing on Cagney and Bogart and Rossellini clambering into a bathtub with Wontner and Palsson to fulfil her customary role as Maddin's muse. The permanently naked Negin is also laudably unabashed in his dual role of Camille and Calypso. But even minor characters like Patric and Rossellini's deceased children Darcy Fehr, Reegan McChayne and Tattiawna Jones make their mark as the truth behind the prodigal's return is revealed.

However, the focus in assessing any Guy Maddin film inevitably falls on the director himself. The scenario he claims to be an autobiography of a house was fashioned with George Toles and is indebted to both Homer and Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher whose 1958 tome The Poetics of Space attempted to analyse the psychological impact a dwelling has upon its occupants. But, from the moment Negin states in voiceover that happiness is free to leave when a house is abandoned while sadness is doomed to remain, it seems clear that this twisting, teasing amalgam of incidents, reveries and recollections is less a chronicle of things forgotten than an exchange between a home and its erstwhile residents.

Despite Patric despatching the deceased members of his gang to the morgue shortly after taking refuge from the police cordon that mysteriously vanishes soon afterwards, it is never obvious who is living and who is dead. The odd clue comes in scenes such as McDonald's misguided attempt to seduce a housemaid and Patric's equally sparky encounter with a bicycle-powered electric chair, which was invented (along with a cumbersome desktop communication device) by Wontner in a desperate bid to make a connection with a father who was rarely home and, even then, was more intent on rearranging the furniture in the parlour than being a role model.

As the nature of Patric's most heinous crime begins to dawn, one can see that Maddin is revisiting his perennial theme of father-child relationships, as well as his preoccupation with sexuality, nostalgia and vintage cinema. He is more than ably abetted in realising his vision by production designer Richardo Alms, cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke and editor John Gurdebeke, who also designed the sound effects that conspire with Jason Staczek's score to provide an audio equivalent of the audacious montages and multiple exposures that suggest Russian, German and French silent cinema rather than Golden Age Poverty Row.

But a nagging sense lingers that less than meets the eye is actually going on here, as Maddin indulges himself with a mix of darkly perverse fantasies and cineastic in-jokes that are so self-consciously obfuscatory that it is tempting to brand them `Maddining'. The notion of Greek gods being holed up in an ordinary domicile has already been explored by the underrated Belgian auteur Harry Kumel and a cast led by Orson Welles in Malpertuis (1971), while Curt McDowell parodied haunted house tropes with even more audacity in Thundercrack! (1975). Thus, while this is often as compelling as it is confusing, Maddin, for once, seems to be imitating rather than innovating and it would have been infinitely more intriguing to see a documentary of his wonderfully inventive Spiritismes project at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, in which he sought to shoot 100 shorts in 100 days by channelling the energy of lost films by such titans as Jean Vigo, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Lois Weber, William Wellman, Erich von Stroheim, Marshall Neilan and Alexander Dovzhenko. Given that his stock company included Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Amira Casar, Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros and Jean-François Stévenin, this really would be a treat for admirers of one of the medium's most consistently daring and dynamic practitioners.

Despite also turning on a disappearance, Asghar Farhadi's About Elly takes place in another world, far away from the trafficking, dealing, exploiting and racketeering that had been seen in a growing number of Iranian films until Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration began to clamp down. Yet, this lacerating study of class, gender, traditional niceties and new realities (which was originally produced in 2009) is every bit as condemnatory of the Islamic Republic and its burgeoning bourgeoisie as Farhadi's Oscar-winning masterpiece, A Separation.

Golshifteh Farahani and her husband Mani Haghighi have arranged to meet old college pals Peyman Moadi, Merila Zare'i, Ahmad Mehranfar and Ra'na Azadivar for a holiday at a resort on the Caspian Sea. Very much the queen bee, Farahani has invited her daughter's favourite teacher, Taraneh Alidoosti, to join them in the hope that she will hook up with Shahab Hosseini, a recent divorcé who is on the look out for a new wife while back in Iran from Germany.

Arriving at the chalet, Farahani feigns surprise when the caretaker informs her it has only been booked for a single night and she convinces him to let her have another property further along the beach by hinting that Alidoosti and Hosseini are newlyweds. During a wild night of hijinks, the friends relive old times and betray the extent to which they have become complacent in their attitudes towards religion, each other and their place in a changing society.

Next morning, clearly uncomfortable at being with people with whom she has little in common besides their offspring, Alidoosti asks Farahani if she can return to Tehran. However, the hostess hides her bag and scuttles off on a shopping expedition with Zare'i, leaving Azadivar and Alidoosti to keep an eye on the kids while the menfolk relax.

Alidoosti amuses the children by flying a kite on the beach. But her fleeting moment of contentment is soon over when Moadi's son gets out of his depth in the sea and Hosseini has to rush in to rescue him. In the furore, nobody notices that Alidoosti has vanished and Farahani wonders if she has returned to the capital. However, when they find her bag, Farahani has to admit that she knew all along that Alidoosti was engaged to Saber Abbar and they call him on her phone to see if he knows her whereabouts.

Panic sets in as Abbar announces that he is coming to the coast and the friends call the police with the greatest reluctance. Haghighi is so angry with Farahani for compromising them that he beats her and Hosseini is also punched by Abbar for flirting with his fiancée. But, as the lies and accusations fly, the police arrive to report that they have found Alidoosti's body and the film ends with the estranged quintet trying to steer a car out of the soft sand before the tide comes in.

With Hossein Jafarian's imagery darkening along with the tone, Farhadi's fourth feature slips assuredly from chic satire into tense mystery. The opening contrasts between the boorish males and their women letting their hair down (without ever shedding their veils) are smartly done. But the characterisation is always slightly thin and the performances are decidedly variable. Moreover, this never feels as trenchant in its denunciations as either Farhadi's previous picture, Fireworks Wednesday (2006), which is due for a belated DVD release later in the year, or A Separation. Nevertheless, this has intriguing things to say about the state of Iran in the run-up to the Green Revolution, as well as more universal themes like peer pressure, social responsibility, hypocrisy and people's ability to believe the lies they tell about themselves and each other.

The film has acquired added interest because of the subsequent fate of Farahani, who is more its real focus than Alidoosti's eponymous victim. Already in trouble with the mullahs for not wearing a headscarf at the New York premiere of Ridley Scott's 2008 thriller Body of Lies (in which she had become the first resident Iranian to appear in a Hollywood movie since the Islamic Revolution in 1979), Farahani (who had been a star since making her debut at 13) was forbidden from working. However, she appeared in About Elly regardless and it only secured a release when President Ahmadinejad personally intervened.

But when Farahani fleetingly bared her breast in a promo for the Césars after she had been nominated for her role in Hiner Saleem's comedy Si tu meurs, je te tue/If You Die, I'll Kill You, she was threatened with physical violence and has been in Parisian exile ever since. One can but hope that this overdue UK release will bring her plight to wider attention and place the 29 year-old alongside Jafar Panahi and other Iranian film artists currently being denied freedom of expression.

A melodramatic air also pervades Robert Guédiguian's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the latest in a cycle of realist studies depicting working-class life in the north-western Marseilles suburb of L'Estaque. Loosely based on the Victor Hugo poem 'Les Pauvres gens/How Good Are the Poor' and starring several members of Guédiguian's trusted stock company, as well as a clutch of intriguing newcomers, this harks back to the Poetic Realist style that was current during the short-lived Popular Front era of the mid-1930s. But, while it is played with typical naturalism and authentically captures the mood of a port mired in the ongoing recession, this is much more sentimental than earlier outings like Marius et Jeannette (1997), À la Place du Cœur (1998) and La Ville est tranquille (2000).

Faced with inevitable redundancies at his dockside company, union rep Jean-Paul Darrousin decides to hold a ballot to determine which of the workforce will be laid off. As a fervent believer in the doctrines of assassinated French socialist Jean Jaurès, Darrousin ignores the advice of best friend Gérard Meylan and includes his own name. Yet, despite finding himself out of work along with several much younger comrades, wife Ariane Ascaride is proud of him for sticking to his principles and she reassures him that they can survive on the money she earns from bourgeois Frédérique Bonnal for looking after her ailing mother, Jeanine Gevaudan.

Son Adrien Jolivet and daughter Anaïs Demoustier and their partners Emilie Piponnier and Raphaël Hidrot are initially delighted by the fact that Darrousin has more time to spend with his grandchildren and work on a pergola in the garden. But he quickly becomes dispirited by the struggle to find work and reassures twentysomething Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet (who feels that Darrousin mishandled the ballot situation) that he will have a much better chance of being hired when they meet at the job centre.

The pair meet again at a party for Ascaride and Darrousin's 30th wedding anniversary and applauds along with everyone else when Meylan presents his buddy with a copy of a Strange sci-fi comic-book that has his name signed inside (and which he claims he found by chance in a secondhand shop) and Jolivet and Demoustier give them tickets bought with a whip-round for a trip to Tanzania to see Mount Kilimanjaro, as Pascal Danel's hit `Kilimandjaro' had always been their tune. The couple is deeply touched, even though they feel guilty that some of their friends had chipped in cash they could scarcely have been able to afford.

Deeply resentful of this sudden windfall, Leprince-Ringuet and his pal Anthony Decadi rob Darrousin and Arascide at gunpoint while they are having a quiet evening playing cards with Meylan and his wife Marilyne Canto. Forced to hand over their cashpoint cards and their pin numbers, the quartet is badly shaken, with Canto (who is also Ascaride's sister) having trouble sleeping and being too scared to venture outside. Cop Robinson Stévenin takes details of the crime, but offers little hope of finding the culprits and it is only when Darrousin spots two boys with his comic on the bus that he tracks them back to the flat their share with Leprince-Ringuet, the older brother who cares for them because mother Karole Rocher is so often absent because of work and her varied love life.

Ascaride is dismayed when Darrousin strikes Leprince-Ringuet when Stévenin allows them some time alone at the police station. But she is just as frustrated when the cops fail to recover Decadi's share of the money and has little enthusiasm for the holiday they can finally take. Indeed, when she goes to the flat to check up on Yann Loubartière and his younger sibling Jean-Baptiste Fonck she takes pity on them and convinces concerned neighbour Julie-Marie Parmentier that she is a friend of Rocher's so she can do their laundry and make sure they are eating properly.

Worried that Darrousin wouldn't be able to understand her motives, Ascaride tells him she has new work commitments and he continues with his own chores without a minute's suspicion. However, when he also discovers that Loubartière and Fonck will be at the mercy of social services if Leprince-Ringuet is jailed, Darrousin tries to have the charge dropped. Moreover, he also cashes in the vacation so that he and Ascaride can foster the boys while their brother serves his sentence.

Demoustier and Jolivet are as shocked as Canto and Meylan, with the latter refusing to speak to his childhood friend for helping Leprince-Ringuet (who is in no way grateful for the gesture) after he caused Canto so much distress. But he recognises that everyone is entitled to a second chance and confesses that he had stolen the issue of Strange when they were kids and found it by chance at his mother's house. As Darrousin and Ascaride take their five young charges to the beach, they fondly hope that everything has worked out for the best.

As always, Darrousin and Ascaride (who is married to Guédiguian) are superb and it's easy to appreciate the affection with which they are held in France. But Leprince-Ringuet and Demoustier fit into their milieu with much less affectation than many young American stars have been wont to do in Woody Allen's comedies and it's to be hoped roles can be found for them in future L'Estaque sagas.

The stinging rebuke that Leprince-Ringuet gives Darrousin while awaiting his court hearing scuffs the Pagnol-cum-Renoiresque cosiness of the denouement, as Guédiguian questions whether the older generation fully appreciates the struggle that youth is going to have to face in a world transformed by the globalisation that they failed to prevent from corroding the socio-economic structures that their forebears had helped erect. However, Guédiguian and Jean-Louis Milesi's screenplay remains sweetly optimistic about the future and unswervingly positive about human nature (hence Ascarides's delight at discovering Metaxa from genial young waiter Pierre Niney) and, if cynical British audiences usually prefer the more caustic decency of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Andrea Arnold, they may just find it in their post-Olympic hearts to warm to this implausible, but well-intentioned drama.

The blue-collar backdrop is equally well established by Pat Holden in When the Lights Went Out, which heads back to Yorkshire in 1974 to recreate what is purported to be the most violent episode of poltergeist activity in European history. Although some details have been altered, the events that took place between 1966-72 in 30 East Drive in Pontefract have a very real resonance for Holden, as the Pritchard family were relatives and his own mother found herself at the heart of the drama. Yet, while this first-hand involvement adds to the authenticity of the action, Holden is also deeply aware of past cinematic manifestations of domestic possession and, thus, this owes as much to the likes of Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) as it does to experiential recollection.

Thirteen year-old Tasha Connor is less than chuffed when she moves into a council house on an estate abutting Castlefield Woods with her parents Steven Waddington and Kate Ashfield and her sulkiness is exacerbated by a growing conviction that she is sharing her bedroom with an ethereal entity. Yet, even though a Buckaroo mule kicks out in the night and a Slinky coils its way down the stairs with no one there to push it, Waddington and Ashfield refuse to believe their daughter and set about making the house their home.

Teased at school for her crush on history teacher Martin Compston, Connor befriends next-door neighbour and fellow outcast Hannah Clifford, who readily accepts her haunting story, but is forbidden from entering the house by her anxious mother Joanne Hartley. But Waddington's scepticism abates when he feels a sinister presence in the coal cellar and Ashfield finally accepts something is amiss when she comes home early from the pub with hairdresser colleague Andrea Lowe to see a grandfather clock crash down the stairs. She also witnesses a freshly wallpapered room being stripped in an instant. Yet, aware that moving out will drop them to the bottom of the council waiting list, they decide to sit tight and even sell their story to the papers and give guided tours to curious locals to bring in some much-needed extra cash.

With powercuts already a fact of everyday life during the miners' battle with Ted Heath's Conservative government, the family makes the most of the poltergeist frequently plunging the premises into darkness. Moreover, following a reassuring message on her Etch-a-Sketch, Connor even begins to regard the spirit as an invisible friend who occasionally tickles her on the bed as she reads her comics. Indeed, when she gets tipsy with Clifford one night and stumbles into an exhibition about a girl who was murdered many years before in Castlefield Woods, Connor steals her locket and hides it in her room.

But the strain of perpetual intrusion begins to tell on Ashfield and, shortly after Connor sees an eye staring back at her through a hole in the cellar door, her mother finds the decaying corpse of a young girl lying next to her in bed and she pays a midnight visit to parish priest Gary Lewis to beg his help. However, he is denied permission to intervene by his bishop, even though there appears to be a religious aspect to the case. Following Connor being terrified by the spectre of a hanging monk on a trip to the ruins of a nearby abbey, Compston does some research at the public library and presents his findings to Waddington, who rejects them as swiftly as he had earlier spurned the help of paranormalist Tony Pitts.

However, when Ashfield is badly stung by wasps from a nest hidden in a wardrobe and Connor is caught sleepwalking in the direction of the woods, Waddington decides enough is enough and he and buddy Craig Parkinson blackmail Lewis with photos proving his affair with his housekeeper unless he performs an exorcism. Meanwhile, Connor has called Pitts and he holds a séance with a female medium who confirms that there are two presences in the house and that while one is trying to persuade the family to leave the other has decidedly malevolent intentions towards Connor.

Holden somewhat throws away the legend of the Monk of Pontefract by having Lewis hurriedly relate the tale to Waddington and Parkinson as he gathers the paraphernalia for the exorcism. Moreover, he is obviously restricted by his meagre budget when it comes to the effects used to enliven the duels that finally free the family from its ordeal. But such quibbles in no way diminish the effectiveness of an atmospheric chiller whose social realist tone reinforces its spookiness. Production designer Jane Levick and costumier Sarah Blenkinsop deserve great credit for recreating the fashions and furnishings of the mid-1970s, while Holden amusingly plays on the period's glam rock lapses in taste by having Connor and Clifford don wigs to mime along to The Sweet hit `Little Willy'.

But this is always first and foremost a ghost story and Holden generates considerable unease by allowing Jonathan Harvey's camera to loiter around rooms in picking up pertinent details, while Rob Hall's editing largely eschews the crowd-pleasing jolt of the shock cross-cut. The cast also underplays admirably, although newcomers Connor and Clifford are frequently more credible in their response to the freakish and increasingly scary happenings than their more experienced co-stars.

With its emphasis on disconcertion rather than dismemberment, gore fans are going to find this rather tame. But it represents another solid entry in the growing catalogue of northern horrors that already includes Susan Jacobson's The Holding and Alastair Siddons's In the Dark Half and will soon be bolstered by Alex Chandon's Inbred.

Finally this week, Dutch documentarist Klaartje Quirijns seeks to find what makes an enigmatic photographer-cum-director tick in Anton Corbijn: Inside Out. Judging by the number of occasions on which her subject walks out of shot following a question that clearly pries too deeply, Corbijn is far from willing to give much away about either his working methods or his private life. Thus, in spite of the effusive compliments paid by a galaxy of satisfied star clients, this is a frustrating snapshot that will offer few revelations for admirers and is likely to convert those yet to be convinced of Corbijn's film-making credentials after the Joy Division biopic Control (2007) and the George Clooney hitman thriller, The American (2010).

The son of a preacher in the Dutch Reformed Church, Corbijn shares a background with Swedish Lutheran chaplain's boy Ingmar Bergman, to whom he bears a vague physical resemblance. However, rather than being obsessed as a boy with the stage and cinema, Corbijn was seduced by rock music and it's clear that he remains a fan from the self-portrait Polaroids depicting him as George Harrison, John Lennon, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain. But this reverence for musicians has given him an ease around bands that makes him a favourite with veterans and newcomers alike.

The shots of Corbijn nodding along amongst the crowd at an Arcade Fire gig betray his awkwardness on the lens-side of the camera, however, and it comes as something of a relief to see him posing U2 against an Irish stone wall and then against a bleak seaside sky. Bono claims that Corbijn and his combo similarly dedicate themselves to capturing the light, but it's clear that the shutterbug identifies more closely with Ian Curtis, the fellow loner who fronted Joy Division and whose short and troubled life he chronicled in Control.

Aaf Corbijn is worried about her brother's inability to cope with dinner parties and his workaholism, but he seems content scouting Italian locations for The American and this trip enables Quirijns to get closest to unearthing something valuable about his methodology and preoccupations, as he lets slip that he admires artists who allow the pain of creation to seep into their work. But Corbijn is firmly back in his shell as he drops into a gallery to discuss the hanging of his work and it's left to Depeche Mode's Martin Gore to lionise him for helping define the image that enabled the band to crack America.

Lou Reed and Metallica are similarly enthusiastic and grateful, as they view the results of a shoot for their Lulu album collaboration. But, while he jokes with them and seems to relish working with George Clooney and Thekla Reuten, he clams up completely during visits to his father's grave and to elderly mother, Marietje Corbijn van Willenswaard, who digresses about the man her parents forbade her to marry. Whether or not this was news to Corbijn, he patently finds the experience embarrassing and he seems entirely justified in deciding to walk away from a question about romantic liaisons while showing Quirijns around the building he is contemplating converting into a studio.

Aware that his own insecurities make him so creatively confident, Corbijn is too restless and self-protective to allow Quirijns to scratch the surface let along know him inside out. Moreover, given that he had already subjected himself to Josh Whiteman's scrutiny for Shadow Play: The Making of Anton Corbijn (2009), it's surprising that he allowed another comparative stranger so much access to his everyday routine over a prolonged four-year period. But, as in Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the melancholic subject is always so firmly in control that this ends up being a lacklustre paean rather than a warts`n'all profile or an insightful artistic assessment.