Oh, Canada. 

As we southern neighbors are wont to do, we’ve tagged you with all manner of national stereotypes. “Comically polite,” comes to mind. “Schitt’s Creek” has kept going the legacy of oddball Canadian comedy that occasionally breaks through here in the states. You gave us the likes of The Kids in the Hall, Michael J. Fox, Neil Young and William Shatner – all, to greater or lesser degree, good things.

But Canada – bigger, colder, and with a population eerily sparse for its mammoth size – has another artistic legacy. Think the inimitable body horrors and philosophical nightmares of director David Cronenberg. Or the equally strange and disturbing cinematic works of Winnipeg’s surrealist auteur Gun Maddin (“Tales from the Gimli Hospital,” “The Saddest Music in the World”). It’s that latter mix of surrealism, dark comedy, and occasional bursts of grotesquerie that mark “The Twentieth Century,” the feature debut of Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin.

Available to stream through Portland’s own Apohadion Theater (with a portion of the rental going to keeping the pandemic-shuttered avant garde film and performance space going), “The Twentieth Century” might be called a quintessential Canadian film – if your image of Canada conjures up cinematic echoes of everyone from Maddin to Cronenberg to John Waters to David Lynch to German silent expressionism to fellow Swedish movie oddball Roy Andersson. 

In short, it is highly recommended. 

In outline, “The Twentieth Century” is a standard political biopic, of the sort Canadian television no doubt churns out in patriotic dutifulness. In this case, the Canadian figure in question is William Lyon Mackenzie King, who, if known to us self-obsessed Americans at all, is remembered as the stalwart statesman who led Canada through World War II. Looking over his Wikipedia page is to be struck with the restrained (dare I say “polite”) admiration on offer. Praise ranges from references to “his wide range of skills that were appropriate to Canada’s needs” to the diplomatic assessment that the unmarried, three (non-consecutive-term) prime minister was an efficient, well-meaning, competent sort. Not exactly the prime candidate for a scathingly satirical, completely bananas, scabrously hilarious exposé in which the young aspiring politician is portrayed (by a miraculously unappealing Dan Beirne) as a spineless, mother-obsessed boot fetishist whose eventual rise to the Canadian equivalent of power comes thanks to a farcical ice-skating battle through “the Quebec City ice vortex.” It’s that kind of movie. 

Throughout, Rankin depicts early 20th-century Canada as a bewildering warren of brutalist geometry, fascistic ethnic jingoism, arcane ritual and soul-warping sexual repression. The dandified, teetotaling King – fixated on greatness thanks to the lifelong, bedridden prophecy of his domineering, inappropriately worshipped mother (Maddin alum Louis Negin, resembling nothing so much as Canada’s own Klaus Kinski) – attempts to seize his destiny through time-honored customs such as a ministerial competition involving leg-wrestling, ribbon-cutting and a particularly bloody, whack-a-mole version of baby seal clubbing. All while hiding his shameful predilection for stunted, footwear-based release in “the fleshpots of Winnipeg.” 

Rankin’s precisely ornate, minimalistic visual style recalls Terry Gilliam at times, as ice floes shift in regimented, jagged triangles and puppets, paper cutouts and Dutch angles all transform 1900s Canada into a both overheated and icily unnerving palette of blacks, whites and the occasional, shocking gush of brightly colored bodily fluids. (There’s this towering cactus in King’s lonely bedroom, given to him as a totem of abstemious virtue by the future PM’s imperiously villainous anti-pleasure doctor that – well, things happen to it, once the feverish King gives in to his carnal desires.) Along the way, there are references to long-ago Canadian political strife concerning Quebecois separatism, the Boer War, and the country’s relationship to the imperial goals of mother county England, all depicted in slyly grotesque exaggerations that – as in the best satire – seem dug bloodily from the very heart of the matter.

Canada itself, in this briskly funny film from one of its brightest young filmmaking stars, emerges as a remarkably vivid caricature of a land whose innate humility vacillates between authoritarian self-deception and shameless groveling. (“Please allow me to express my most unquestioning inferiority,” is how Beirne’s King introduces himself.) Summing up one’s own national character is an overwhelming task for any artist, but Rankin’s deadpan take on his homeland’s contradictory nature (Canada’s pre-maple leaf flag is referred to solemnly as “The Disappointment,” while the anguished King blurts out a heartfelt “I only ever meant to be moderate and inoffensive”) is – in its utterly bananas way – as trenchant a piece of cultural dissection as I’ve seen in ages.

All of this is to say that “The Twentieth Century” is a singular, hilarious, breakneck cult comedy, a history lesson drawn with precisely calibrated lunacy. Comedy is hard. Satire is harder. Absurdist comic satire is nearly impossible to sustain. “My Twentieth Century” is 90 madcap minutes of surrealist social satire that says more about power, sexuality, neuroses and our northern neighbors than any film with references to the ritual of the fragrant “matrimonial sapling” of Toronto and electrified genital alarms should be able to manage. 

“The Twentieth Century” is available to stream through The Apohadion Theater until Dec. 18. A $12 rental gets you a week’s rental, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Apohadion directly. Support your local venues and get weird. 

Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.

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