In Silver Screen Fiend, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt describes the mindset of the cinema addict or “sprocket fiend” and what the almost subliminal sound of a film projector in a theater means to him:

“The defiant, twenty-four-frames-per-second mechanical heartbeat that says, at least for the duration of whatever movie you’re watching, the world’s time doesn’t apply to you. You’re safe in whatever chronal flow the director chooses to take you through. Real time, or a span of months or years, or backward and forward through a life. You are given the space of a film to steal time. And the projector is your only clock.”

This is a perfect description of one of the primary reasons cinema holds its most ardent devotees so tightly in its sway. More than any other art form, cinema is uniquely qualified to mimic the form of dreams.

A dreamer may dream an entire life over the span of a few minutes during an afternoon nap; similarly, a film can compress centuries into hours. Fades to and from black can make hours feel like days or weeks. Sounds and music can make the most benign images seem sinister and menacing. Actors can impart the uncanny bearing of dream-people with simple choices of delivery and movement. In film and in dreams, time does not necessarily work the way it does in real life.

Filmmaker David Lynch shocked many fans when he shot his feature Inland Empire (2006) on digital video instead of film. He explained that the less-defined images produced by digital video, the ability to shoot uninterrupted takes for long periods of time (instead of being restricted by the length of a reel of film), and the possibilities of nonlinear digital editing gave him more “room to dream” than film.

The discovery of these facets of new filmmaking technology is perhaps the most pure distillation of Lynch’s cinematic obsessions: namely, Inland Empire plays out across the screen as a terrifying nightmare, the kind from which a dreamer wakes feeling unsettled and worried that her subconscious is trying to tell her something important.

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has cited Lynch as one of the primary influences on his own work, but where Lynch draws on classical Hollywood cinema as his reference, Maddin’s cinematic obsessions are more obscure. Instead of The Wizard of Oz and film noir, Maddin draws from silent film of various countries, and he filters the look and tone of those films through his own peculiar sensibilities. Maddin’s films are often humorous, poignant, and horrific, occasionally all at the same time.

In the time since his last feature, 2011’s Keyhole, Maddin has been plumbing the depths of cinema’s ancient history with a project called Seances, summarized thusly: “Maddin invited the sad spirits of lost films to possess his assembled actors and compel them to act out the old stories, while the spirit-photographer/director captured the precious narratives with his camera.” In other words, Maddin and his collaborators attempted to conjure the spirit of films that have been lost to time or that never existed in the first place and give them a new existence.

It is from out of this ambitious project that Maddin’s latest feature, The Forbidden Room, grew. As Inland Empire to David Lynch, The Forbidden Room is the ultimate expression of Maddin’s aesthetics and obsessions. More than that, however, the film is also perhaps the best example in the history of feature-length narrative cinema of how film can mimic the form of dreams.

Before Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room begins, it has already made a clear statement of intent. The opening-credit title cards shimmer and erupt into different layouts and fonts, the images constantly shifting. It is as though the viewer is simultaneously watching the opening credits and attempting to describe the titles to themselves while incorrectly remembering what they look like.

The film follows through with this style, its images constantly morphing into each other and making the screen itself look like some vast, restless, living thing. The result is a convincing impression of the output of some imaginary, primitive machine that can dredge imagery from the subconscious and project it directly to the screen.

Again, in short, the experience of watching The Forbidden Room is probably the closest a feature-length narrative film has ever gotten to what it must be like to wander around in someone’s brain for a couple of hours. And in this case, that brain happens to be an endless labyrinth of cinema history and wildly inventive absurdity.

Maddin’s films have frequently been obliquely or explicitly autobiographical, addressing concepts of memory and storytelling in creating a sense of one’s identity. While there are no characters named “Guy Maddin” in The Forbidden Room — as there were in his Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! — the film is strongly concerned with functions of memory and story. A recurring concept is one that recalls Patton Oswalt’s belief of the “sprocket fiend”: that stories are told to “steal time.”

The main narrative thread in The Forbidden Room follows men trapped in a submarine in which the air is running out. A woodsman — more specifically, a “saplingjack,” or a lumberjack in training — somehow appears in the submarine and spurs one of the men to tell stories as they make their way toward the titular forbidden room, the captain’s chamber.

Even as the last minutes of oxygen tick down, they feel compelled to finish their stories. In another of its many sub-stories, a man about to be murdered by his own double postpones his death by telling the double a story. These sort of echoes occur across the stories in the film, which are also sometimes directly tied together through different levels of storytelling “reality.”

In some ways, The Forbidden Room also recalls Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac in that it feels very much like a summation and overview of Maddin’s filmmaking career. In one story, Udo Kier plays a character called The Dead Father, which is the title of Maddin’s first short film from 1985.

Characters and stories recall his other works: an amnesiac (Archangel), a steamy jungle (“Sissy-Boy Slap-Party”), snow-covered mountains (Careful), a strange hospital (Tales from the Gimli Hospital), orphan children (Brand Upon the Brain!), an epic journey through a small space (Keyhole), musical numbers (The Saddest Music in the World), brothers in love with the same woman (“The Heart of the World”), a gravely ill mother (Cowards Bend the Knee), and much more.

For anyone familiar with Maddin’s work, the result is even more of a dense kaleidoscope of references to strange lost genres and the meanings certain motifs have assumed in his previous films. It is both exhilarating and exhausting, and absolutely demands multiple viewings to parse everything Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson have packed into its running time.

Now that The Forbidden Room has been released theatrically, at some point in the near future, an online version of Seances will be made available. Maddin explained in an interview “the films shot for the Seances will NEVER exist as stand-alone shorts. They will only be broken up into fragments and placed in the Seances program for recombinations and endless permutations for the visitors to the interactive.”

Maddin has previously experimented with unusual methods of presenting his films: Cowards Bend the Knee was originally presented as a 10-part peepshow art installation, and Brand Upon the Brain! was shown in a tour in which screenings were accompanied by a live orchestra and foley artists, as well as a different “interlocuter” performing the film’s narration (including Laurie Anderson, Justin Bond, Crispin Glover, and Maddin himself among others).

Still, the Seances project is altogether more ambitious and potentially unprecedented. The underlying idea is reminiscent of the ill-fated “interactive movie,” but given Maddin’s imagination, it is entirely possible that Seances will act as an extension of the strange dreamworld of The Forbidden Room in a unique way that has never really been seen before.

With The Forbidden Room, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson have created a singular film experience that draws on the origins and lost niches of cinema history but that could only have been made with modern digital filmmaking technology.

The images are grainy. Battered and worn, scratched and dirty. Water-damaged, colors fading and bleeding. The imperfections of physical film stock are integrated into every moment of the film, which roils and ripples like water, and races like thought.

This film could not exist without the old films Maddin loves, and it also could not exist without the technology that allows filmmakers to manipulate images in ways previous generations of directors could hardly have imagined. Given how deeply indebted the film is to cinema history, it is ironic that there probably are no existing physical prints of it.