In a mountain village where avalanches answer to sound, the residents learn to whisper and live in a state of permanent restraint. One wrong shout and the whole town goes under the snow.

CAREFUL (1992) is set in the fictional alpine town of Tolzbad, where repression is not a metaphor but civic policy. Grigorss, played by Kyle McCulloch, is a butler-in-training who harbors a secret love for Klara, betrothed to his brother Johann, played by Brent Neale, while Johann nurses an attraction to their mother Zenaida, played by Gosia Dobrowolska. Jackie Burroughs plays Frau Teacher, the sadistic head of the butler school, and Paul Cox plays the reclusive Count Knotkers, the household they all aspire to serve.

Guy Maddin wrote, directed, shot, and edited the film from a script he developed with George Toles. The whole thing was built in a Winnipeg warehouse out of papier-mâché, forced perspective, and painted backdrops, staged in the style of German Expressionism and the Bergfilm, the mountain-film genre of the 1920s. The tinted frames and paralyzed performances look like a silent-era melodrama recovered from an archive that never existed.

The film turns Freudian family horror into a town-wide ordinance, where every forbidden desire must be kept beneath a whisper or bring the mountain down on everyone’s heads.