I’m a longtime admirer of Guy Maddin, the Canadian master of retro cinema who was making stylish, black-and-white silent films long before “The Artist.’’ But I have to confess that this surreal departure by the iconoclastic filmmaker tried my patience more than a bit.
Still delivering stunning monochrome images, but this time with dialogue, Maddin delivers a violent update of “Ulysses’’ that transforms the hero (Jason Patric) into a 1930s gangster who returns home to his creaky old house after a lengthy absence.
Toting the body of a drowned teenage girl (Brooke Palsson) who’s returned to life, as well as a bound hostage who turns out to be Ulysses’ teenage son (David Wontner), our hero encounters a wife (Isabella Rossellini) dying of cancer, her naked elderly father (Louis Negin), a mysterious doctor (Udo Kier) and a rival gangster (Johnny Chang).
Any film that claims to have been inspired partly by the Bowery Boys’ “Spooks Run Wild’’ can’t be casually dismissed, but while it has its moments, “Keyhole’’ feels like something that might have worked better as a short. It’s less playful than Maddin’s earlier works, and notably less fun than the Coen brothers’ riff on Homer’s saga set in the same era, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?’’