3 Mulligans

I had very little information about this film before adding it to my Netflix queue, but I did know it was part of The Criterion Collection, shot in black & white, silent, and recently filmed in 2006.  Those descriptions didn’t add up to much, but after reading about its storyline I couldn’t pass it up.  That alone made the decision easy.

When a man visits the island lighthouse where he grew up, which also doubled as an orphanage, he is confronted by secrets kept from him by his parents.  While his mother keeps a close watch on the orphans, his father occupies himself with basement experiments.  When it is discovered that all the orphans have similar marks on their heads, a pair of famous kid detectives show up to investigate.

Brand Upon The Brain! was everything I was looking for in a movie, mainly because I’ve never seen anything like it.  My attention was glued to the screen until it ended and I watched it without a single interruption, no small feat since my two young teens watched it, too.  There’s additional fun with getting to choose from six narrator voices, but after hearing Crispin Glover’s (Simeon insisted) I wished I had chosen Isabella Rossellini’s.