Jam-packed with enough kinetically photographed action to seem like a never-ending cliff-hanger, Guy Maddin's tremendous Cowards Bend the Knee is a Feuillade serial ultra-condensed and blenderised, as ghostwritten by Euripides. If fiction is sometimes barely disguised autobiography, Cowards is its mirror image, twisted and poisoned wish-fulfillment: the mythomaniacal Maddin casts "himself" (actually, Darcy Fehr) as a hockey sniper made lily-livered by mother and daughter femme fatales, and resurrects his father as the team's radio broadcaster and his own romantic antagonist. Set in a shadow-suffused hockey arena and a Mabuse-like beauty salon-slash-abortion clinic lined with two-way mirrors, the plot drips with the Grecian formula, as sordid family secrets spawn unintentional murder most foul.

Originally conceived of and presented as a peephole show, Cowards Bend The Knee’s ten chapters concoct an alternative cinematic biography for director Guy Maddin, torn between the influence of his hockey star father and his attraction to Meta, the beautiful girl from the local beauty salon / illegal abortion clinic. Ela Orleans' new soundtrack follows her new scores for Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.

“This wild, gorgeous and almost insane new score by Ela Orleans has completely reinvented Cowards. She understood at musical levels the depths of shame, heights of hysteria, and quivering viscous ick I felt while shooting it; she drew out from the film every dark strand of soiled soul unravelling within and hung it in a new moonbeam for all the appalled to see.” Guy Maddin

Content Warnings | Cowards Bend The Knee contains depictions of abortion; scenes of bloody gore; scenes of surgery; scenes of murder and physical violence; nudity; a scene of over the clothes genital touching of a dead/unconscious body.