Matthew Rankin has never been a filmmaker who colors inside the lines. The Winnipeg-born director, whose 2019 feature "The Twentieth Century" reimagined the rise of William Lyon Mackenzie King as a gonzo cabinet of surrealist grotesques, returns with a project that sounds even harder to pin down. His new film, "Canadian Auteur Matthew Rankin Had a Fever Dream About Canadian History," is exactly what its title promises: a hallucinatory, episodic descent into the country's past, filtered through the subconscious of an artist who has spent his career picking at the seams of national myth.
The film, which Rankin wrote and directed, arrives as the latest dispatch from a filmmaker whose sensibility sits somewhere between Guy Maddin's silent-era hallucinations and the deadpan absurdism of a particularly literate sketch troupe. It is, by all accounts, less a history lesson than a history fever - a nocturnal, logic-loosened tour through the symbols, grievances, and oddities that make up the idea of Canada.
A Dream Logic Approach to the National Story
Rankin has described the project as emerging from an actual fever he experienced, a detail that will surprise no one who has followed his work. Where "The Twentieth Century" took the form of a deranged biopic, this new film reportedly unfolds as a series of dreamlike vignettes, each one touching down on a different fragment of the Canadian past before dissolving into the next.
That structure gives Rankin room to roam. Early word from festival audiences suggests the film moves through colonial-era tableaux, mid-century bureaucratic absurdities, and contemporary anxieties with the same restless energy. The through-line is not chronology but consciousness - the way a country's history gets compressed, distorted, and replayed in the mind of someone trying to make sense of it.
The title's self-aware construction - referring to its maker in the third person, as though the film were a documentary about its own creation - is of a piece with Rankin's fondness for framing devices that keep the audience at a slight, productive distance. He is not asking viewers to lose themselves in a story so much as to wander through one.
A Career Built on Productive Discomfort
Rankin's path to this point has been anything but conventional. He came up through the short film world, developing a visual grammar that drew on early cinema, Canadian institutional design, and a distinctly prairie sense of humor. "The Twentieth Century" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Canadian First Feature, and went on to build a devoted following among viewers drawn to its handmade aesthetic and its refusal to treat history with reverence.
That reputation precedes him into this new work. Rankin belongs to a lineage of Canadian filmmakers - one thinks of Maddin, of the early shorts of Sarah Polley's collaborators, of the experimental tradition that has always run alongside the country's more polite mainstream - who treat the nation's self-image as raw material rather than sacred text. His films are funny, but the laughter tends to stick in the throat.
"Canadian Auteur Matthew Rankin Had a Fever Dream About Canadian History" extends that project. It is, in its way, a film about how a country remembers itself when it is not paying attention - when memory slips into dream and the official story gives way to something stranger and more honest.
What the Film Is Really After
Beneath the formal playfulness, there is a serious question at work. Canada has long been a nation that defines itself by what it is not - not American, not British, not quite anything - and Rankin's film seems to circle that absence. His fever dream is not a nightmare of national shame or a patriotic pageant. It is something more elusive: a portrait of a country trying, and failing, and trying again to see itself clearly.
The result is a movie that resists summary. It is unlikely to be a breakout commercial hit, and Rankin has never shown much interest in that. What it offers instead is the pleasure of a singular imagination let loose on a subject that most filmmakers treat with either boosterism or avoidance. Rankin does neither. He dreams it.
For audiences who have followed his career, that will be enough. For everyone else, "Canadian Auteur Matthew Rankin Had a Fever Dream About Canadian History" is an invitation to get a little disoriented - to watch a nation's story unspool the way it actually lives in the mind, jumbled, funny, and impossible to straighten out.
Source: Hollywood Reporter