It's not worth really pointing to one particular performance or even the music (which is eerie and sublime all at once) even though everything needed to come together to make this as absorbing as it is. What Archangel has above all else in Guy Maddin's vision and concepts, somewhat like David Lynch's Eraserhead before it and not many other films since, is the singularity and commitment to placing you directly into a world that you know is not realistic, but that is the point after all. You are in the hands of someone who is showing you artifice and you know these people are often in rooms or in a warehouse somewhere in Canada, and (not but, and) it's is an epic of despair.
This is a capital D Deam of silent and experimental/avant-garde cinema, and excavation practically of a dream in a sense, and a dream-cum-nightmare of war, and it looks at the world of Patriarchy (from male romantic dominance to how someone disciplines a child. There is also such glorious absurdity and as soon as those folks packed into that small house on the outskirts of Russia tend to that child who just had a stroke for some reason (!) With careful and gentle horse brushes all over his body (!!), you know this is something you have to take on its crazy terms.
But then again war is crazy, and the people who create Boogeymen out of the likes of the Bolsheviks - big monster men with big ears and big claws, after all, and can only be taken out after a coward uses his expunged intestines to strangle the brutes - should be mocked. Like in a Dream, or a nightmare, or a mix of light and dark together (like an Avant-Garde cup of coffee), it is not something that you piece together logically but by how it is based in spme unidentified place in time with a protagonist who is losing his grip on his own constructed reality (if it was there at all).
Archangel is unique also as both romantic and ironic storytelling at the same time, and it is an incredibly tricky prospect for Maddin to balance both tones but he kind of gets there, and I don't mean just that with Boles and the woman named Veronika who he says/demands/confusingly misremembers is Iris; the shots where characters get on horses or carriages, which you know was done in a room with like fake snow being blasted at someone's face and a rocking from side to side on a low grade rig, it speaks to something we love about how tactile the movies can be and how they conjure such visions that can *only* be done on film. This also goes to moments and shots where it is those two actors sharing the frame or looking at one another (sometimes with memories intact and sometimes... not).
Is some of the dubbing sketchy? Actually, not as much as you'd think (or now that I told you the movie is dubbed with dialog it already has an uphill battle, right), and because of the milky and smoky black and white atmosphere and the equally play-dress up and believablity Maddin has some breathing room to have his actors mouth to their movements and the artifice plays into it all. And are there moments or times when the pacing gets a little odd? Sure, it's an Expressionistic Canadian (post?! Kind of WW1 memory piece about memory loss and gruesome male dominated violence!
But it is so much fun and you can feel the heart and sweat put into it while none of it feels like it had so much effort as could have happened on a low/microbudget. There's madness and kindness and, again, rabbits and weird gooey blood, and it all works.
