10 Gangster Movies That Mess With Your Brain
1. Keyhole (2012)
A gang of villains stages a home invasion of a haunted house and finds themselves under siege by police without and ghosts within - but their leader, Ulysses Pick, used to live in the house and his wife is still upstairs.
Narrated by a naked old man chained in the attic, celebrated artist and director Guy Maddin's Keyhole is an abundance of style and substance often divorced from one another, owing a good deal to F.W. Murnau and David Lynch in equal measure.
The gangsters invading the once happy home could be dead themselves, and the ghosts alive: in fact, the whole story could be the concoction of a lunatic.
By turns bewildering, terrifying, captivating and oddly moving, Keyhole is completely unforgettable. Who is the drowned girl Ulysses carries into the house, and can she really read his mind? Why doesn\t Ulysses recognise the gangs hostage as his son? Why do all the doors in the house need to be negotiated before they can be opened? Why is there a bog in a courtyard in the centre of the house? And why the constant repetition of the key phrase, remember your disease?
Dreamlike and completely engrossing, Keyhole is less a linear movie and more a cinematic experience: a dreamscape, claustrophobic and vibrant despite the pecked black and white: a silent movie that won't stop screaming.