Mackenzie King—what a wanker, right? Not only that, Canada’s 10th prime minster (played by Fargo’s Dan Beirne) was a chinless, slope-shouldered coward and a chronic onanist with a fetish for boot sniffing. And he probably fucked his mom, played here by Guy Maddin regular Louis Negin as a bedridden clairvoyant. These are among the least revisionist ideas in Matthew Rankin’s gleeful 16mm attack on Canadian historical propriety, shot in a style you might call Winnipeg expressionist. Of course, craziest of all is the notion that our elected leaders might be groomed and manipulated by some sort of untouchable genocidal elite, represented by scene-stealing Seán Cullen’s corpulent governor general, Lord Muto. As a dark theory of the colonial impulse, Wilhelm Reich would approve.

Georgia Straight, September 2019