Pity poor Guy Maddin's mother. The Canadian director's last film, "Brand Upon the Brain!," featured a psychotic, domineering mother who spied on her children from atop an isolated lighthouse.

In his newest, "My Winnipeg," an unhinged, utterly delightful "documentary" about his hometown, his own mother (or a caricature of her) is a central character. She possesses a psychic ability to see through her children, to project onto them dark and demented desires.

Yet in her own monstrous way, she's a remarkably sympathetic character. That mix of sympathies parallels the masterful manipulation of tone that makes Maddin's work so compelling, entertaining and powerful.

Maddin has called his new film a "docu-fantasia," and it's an apt label for an idiosyncratic mix of local myth and history, dubious science, gossip, personal rumination and endless camp humor.

Filmed in black and white in Maddin's signature early-film style, "My Winnipeg" is supposedly the director's effort to "film his way" out of the town he grew up in.

To do that, he must confront his own past, so Maddin's narrator tells us that he has rented the house he grew up in and has hired actors to re-enact traumatic scenes from his childhood.

The city of Winnipeg emerges as a lovable absurdity, a mythic yet claustrophobic place. "My Winnipeg" doesn't even feel particularly rooted in Winnipeg at all — Maddin's poetic and absurdist hometown could be almost any small city anywhere.