Stump the Guesser! (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2020) (Patreon)

Although Maddin and the Johnson brothers' latest production does not maintain the breakneck pace of Maddin's 2000 mini-masterpiece The Heart of the World -- what on earth does? -- Stump the Guesser! is a bit of a spiritual cousin to that twenty year old film. [Ouch. -- Ed.]  Not only does it pack its 19 minutes with the amount of content one usually finds in a feature film. It also employs Maddin's usual tongue-in-cheek version of Soviet montage style for a story that actually takes place in the Soviet Union, or some similar Eastern Bloc nation, or perhaps an imaginary, hypothetical Fantasyland that shares the stentorian bureaucracy and strapping peasantry of the cinematic U.S.S.R. Who's to say?

This much is clear. The film's putative hero (Adam Brooks) works as a carnival guesser, and although his accuracy is clearly astonishing, he is also one of a number of men to hold this position, so much so that there is a Guesser's Bureau that issues (and revokes) Guessers' Licenses. Although his capabilities may be supernatural, he is apparently aided backstage by a supply of "guessing milk," which he chugs between challenges. But this gainfully employed, official State wizard is thrown off his game when a beautiful young woman (Stephanie Berrington) asks him to guess the color of her eyes. He not only misses the answer; he falls instantly in love, only to be dismissively informed that -- sorry, sucker! -- she is his long-lost sister.

This being a Maddin production, the threat of incest is less a taboo than a narrative complication, and as luck would have it, the downcast guesser bumps into a scientist (Brent Neale) who just happens to be working to disprove the theory of heredity. What luck! If he can help the scientist in his quest, he will be free to marry his sister. And maybe he'll even get his guesser's mojo back.

As some critics have noted, Stump the Guesser! is the first M/J/J production to be fully digital, from shooting through editing and post-production. This results in a cleaner, less "dated" look that some purists have found a bit off-putting. But I think this is something Maddin and the Johnsons take into account. While unexpected digressions and random ejaculations are nothing new in Cine-Maddin, there is an oneiric tone in Stump the Guesser! that is more absolute. The very concepts that drive it on, and the bizarre occurrences that move us in and out of various scenes, are treated as completely logical within the world of the film, but like a half-remembered dream, one is hard-pressed to account for why any one event took shape in the manner that it did. The smoothness and present-tense texture of digital video goes quite nicely with this hazy impression of the past, which is less an homage than an unconscious jumble of urges. 

Think of it this way. You could argue that by this point, Guy Maddin can make films like this in his sleep. The comic nightmare of Stump the Guesser! suggests that that's precisely what he's done.