One of the more awkward topics in the early points of a romantic relationship involves the discussion of past loves. The reality is most people are not their current love’s first love, and yet some struggle to admit there was someone before them. This topic can be most sensitive in the early months of a relationship, especially if there is a concern that feelings for an ex might still exist. Fear about this isn’t exclusive to new relationships, however. In Andrew Haigh’s sublime 45 Years, a couple who has been together for nearly half a century finds their relationship suddenly tested by a voice from the past.

That couple is the Mercers: Kate (Charlotte Rampling), a retired teacher, and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), a retired plant worker. They live a quiet life in the British countryside where they go about their business the ways most retired couples do: walking the dog, puttering about the house, running errands in town, etc. Those halcyon days of their golden years take a sharp turn just a week before their 45th wedding anniversary, when Geoff receives a letter that the body of a long-deceased former love has been found. “My Katya,” as Geoff refers to her when he breaks the news to his wife, was the love he knew before Kate. The discovery of Katya, whose body was frozen solid and lost for half a century in the mountains of Switzerland, changes Geoff. That change, along with the subsequent discovery of other information, changes Kate.

There’s a high degree of difficulty in properly presenting 45 Years without it devolving into some mawkish soap about old age and young love and regret and whatnot. Fortunately, it’s a challenge Andrew Haigh (who adapted the screenplay from David Constantine‘s short story In Another Country) more than rises to. The filmmaker has a keen awareness that a 45-year marriage is simultaneously strong and vulnerable, and he has a clear understanding that the frailty of the human ego is something that doesn’t fade with age.

The strength of the Mercers’ relationship is the most obvious aspect of the film. A couple doesn’t get to its 45th wedding anniversary on cruise control. Marriages take work to get that far, and the Mercers have put in that work, but their success is measured by more than just a number. It’s also measured by their contentment and ease with each other. It’s a subtle but important thing. This is an elderly couple not portrayed as bitter or cantankerous or even slyly dismissive of each other; they love each other and have for a long time. The fact that they are planning a 45th-anniversary party is a great example of that. They had planned a party for their 40th—a more logical milestone—but illness got in the way. They didn’t reschedule it for as soon as possible, nor did they clamor to try again at 41. They shrugged their shoulders, knew in their hearts they’d be together no matter what the year, and rounded to the next 5-year marker to throw a replacement party.

The part that’s less obvious, the part that’s more important, is the vulnerability of a relationship that has lasted so long. It isn’t a vulnerability that comes with boredom or complacency because these aren’t people looking for something new. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. These are people who are comfortable with, perhaps subconsciously cling to, the familiarities and rituals they have built up over 45 years. The film is rich with little suggestions of this. So when something like the unexpected reemergence of the corpse of a past love enters this familiar space, it might not crumble the house, but it chips the paint, and chipped paint is the kind of thing that gnaws at someone because they know it’s there and they can’t leave it alone.

And therein lies the never-aging frailty of the human ego that Haigh gets so right. With the reemergence of Katya’s body, Geoff is whisked back to the past and once again reminded of a love realized and yet left incomplete by tragedy. If he were a 40-something who had run into a high school flame at a reunion, he might buy a flashy car. He’s not that guy. Instead, he starts smoking again. He tries reading Kierkegaard again. He moves a little closer to being that irritable old man who wonders if he did it right. He worries that his old love’s frozen body has not aged a day while his has aged thousands. These little changes, these little comments, this renewed interest in a time he long filed away keeps the paint chipping and threatens to crack a wall.

Kate is in tune with it all. Acutely.

At first, it’s not that big a deal. Sure, it’s an old love, but it’s a dead love. However, as Geoff’s interest in Kierkegaard and finding old mementos increases, and as those moments when the couple would share quiet small talk turn into a discussion about Katya (again), Kate wears down. She asks questions—little ones—that illustrate the stoic and supportive face she wears on the outside hides an unraveling self-confidence on the inside. Learning something new and unexpected only exacerbates the problem because now it feels like Geoff is hiding something. When she starts poking around in the attic, her disbelief is crippling. The stakes are immeasurable because it’s not as if she might lose her husband to some fling the way a 40-year-old might; she might lose her husband to a ghost, and there’s no fighting that.

Rampling plays her incredibly deep and complex role to perfection. There is no scenery to chew, no impassioned speech to make, no confrontation to be had with “the other woman,” so in the absence of that, Rampling wields subtlety like a surgeon with a scalpel: precise, efficient, effective. It’s an amazing performance, and one made greater by the fact that Haigh keeps her the focus of almost every scene. But Courtenay is no slouch either, and it takes a real actor to be convincing in his late-life change and give Rampling everything she needs to shine.

Love does not have a finish line. There is no point along the timeline of a relationship where someone can say, “We made it this far; nothing can come between us now.” A relationship is like any other living thing: it needs constant care and attention, and it is always susceptible to damage, whether it’s a budding flower of romance or a mighty oak of marriage. With 45 Years, Andrew Haigh and his pair of stars prove this to be true, and they do so in the most well-measured yet mesmerizing of ways.

Note: This is a review of an earlier cut of The Forbidden Room that screened at Sundance and Berlin. It has since been cut down by approximately ten minutes.

For Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, film isn’t just a thing people make. It’s a living thing. A universe existing right next to ours, where time and space collapse into a giant stew of celluloid and pixels. There’s no describing The Forbidden Room, Guy Maddin’s latest film which he co-directed with Johnson. I can merely state facts about it, but to actually attempt to describe the experience of watching it? That’s a fool’s errand because the only way to know about The Forbidden Room is to experience it for yourself. Is it Guy Maddin’s best work to date? Probably. Is it a masterpiece? Definitely. Maddin, who’s known for having a progressive and spiritual perspective towards cinema, has made what might be the purest representation of his mindset on film to date.

How did The Forbidden Room get here? You could say it all started back at the invention of film itself (for dramatic purposes), or five years ago (for practical purposes). Maddin created an installation called Hauntings that had him researching abandoned projects by master filmmakers and re-creating scenes from these “lost” films. Eventually, Maddin’s interests turned from the figurative to the literal; he began looking (with Johnson) into real films that are forever lost, either destroyed or unintentionally abandoned. After researching these films, Maddin began remaking them, recruiting a cast of big, international arthouse names (Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Roy Dupuis, Ariane Labed, Udo Kier, Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros and lots more) to come in and “channel” the spirits of these lost films, acting them out in a series of short film remakes. How do you remake something you haven’t seen? Watch The Forbidden Room and find out.

So what is The Forbidden Room about? Rather than go for an episodic structure, Maddin and Johnson link every story together through a nesting doll structure that goes so deep it makes a film like Inception look like a pop-up book. It all starts with an old man in a bathrobe (Louis Negin, who winds up in almost every “remake” in some sort of role) giving advice on how to take a bath. The camera then goes under the bath water, where it reveals a submarine full of trapped men. Their captain is missing, their cargo of blasting jelly can explode at any minute, and their oxygen supply is low, requiring them to suck on pancakes to try and get oxygen from the air pockets. Suddenly, a lumberjack (Dupuis) finds his way onto the submarine, and when the men ask how he got there, the film flashes back to tell his story: while chopping trees in the forest, he decides to rescue the beautiful Margot (Clara Furey) from The Red Wolves, described as “the most feared forest bandits in all of Holstein-Schleswig.” The lumberjack goes off to rescue Margot who then has a dream where she’s an amnesiac bar singer, a bar where an indescribable singer performs a song about a man (Kier) obsessed with grabbing asses, which transitions into a dreaming volcano, and then a newspaper article within the volcano’s dream, and then the inside of an x-ray of a pelvis, and then…

The amount of transitions, digressions and leveling up and down within storylines just goes on and on, to the point where trying to make heads or tails of anything loses its meaning. Everything co-exists and stands alone. High art and low art combine into one. Dreams, memories, fantasies and nightmares weave in and out of each other. Maddin and Johnson put the bulk of their efforts into the post-production process, taking the digitally shot footage and dousing it with every possible imperfection or antiquated method from both analog and digital eras: two-strip Technicolor, warped stock, burn marks, title cards, data moshing, colour dyes, and whatever else they could pull out from this cinematic stew they conjured up. And through all of this madness, Maddin and Johnson have created an exhaustive and hilarious masterwork. The sort of film where a hysterical title card like “The skull-faced man and his gang of Skeletal Insurance Defrauders” gets lost in the shuffle of the seemingly endless ideas thrown on-screen from start to end. It’s a film that has endless rewatch value because it’s impossible to remember every detail from it. It’s one of the most perfect collections of imperfections ever made. It is, quite simply, The Forbidden Room.

Originally published as part of our coverage for the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.