The first full-length film from the twin masters of the sublime and bizarre is also their first to utilize, to any great degree, human actors. While some may find this the ultimate departure for the team they consider to be the greatest puppeteers alive, suffice to say the Brothers Quay have created an eerie masterpiece in which living actors very adequately take the place of their less mobile brethren. Loosely based on the story “Jakob von Gunten” by Swiss writer Robert Walser, the film is set entirely within the walls of the titular institute: a bizarre, timeless boarding school for professional servants-to-be, lorded over by an entirely mad principal, Herr Benjamenta (Fassbinder regular John) and what appears to be his sexually explosive sister Lisa (Krige). Into this maelstrom (literally — the film opens with repeated shots of swirling, spilling, splattering water) arrives our hero, as it were, Jakob von Gunten (Rylance), a butler-in-training who soon finds himself learning far more than he bargained for at the Institute. Trying to describe a Brothers Quay film with any degree of exactitude is nearly as difficult as trying to comprehend the constantly shifting degrees of meaning inherent in the images they keep showing you. As with all of the Brothers’ films, you leave feeling slightly shaken, a bit disturbed, and troubled as though you had just awoken from a bitter dream you can’t quite recall. Institute Benjamenta is no different in this regard — there’s even a heightened sense of the outre that comes with using real live actors against the familiar, washed-out backdrops that suddenly spring into alarming focus. Shot in hazy black-and-white with an amazing number of subtle camera and optical tricks, Institute Benjamenta is a triumph of the surreal, a masterwork of fantasy, and a breathtakingly tenebrous walk off the beaten path and into the dark, pulsing forest of dreams.
This article appears in April 19 • 1996 (Cover).