Home: a haven, or a prison? The place that holds us back, or sends us forward? Flowing underneath the surface wizardry — or is it insanity? — of Guy Maddin’s pseudo-documentary “My Winnipeg” is this larger question of why we simultaneously yearn for and loathe the place from whence we came. “Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg,” Mr. Maddin announces at the outset, his droll delivery implying not only a sense of nostalgia but of disgust and amazement. “I must leave it. I must leave it now. But how to escape one’s city?”

Given its contradictions, its flights of fancy, and its outright fabrications, “My Winnipeg” is surely one of the year’s most mysterious and memorable mad-scientist concoctions. For Mr. Maddin, who, much like David Lynch, has operated outside the boundaries of traditional narrative for the bulk of his two-decade career, it is also the film in which all of his past cinematic experiments mingle into a perfect thread. This is his mainstream-ready masterpiece, his “Mulholland Drive.”

It’s also a thread so slippery and enigmatic that to try to describe this film’s plot out of context almost misses the point. Mr. Maddin has made a career out of imagining characters and worlds of grotesque beauty, establishing his own set of ground rules that are at once obvious and involving. He distorts his images, scrambles his stories, and jumps among his favorite, arcane genres (silent films, socialist propaganda, film noir) in such a way that his audience is not removed from the proceedings, but lulled ever closer into his visceral dreamscape.

What marries “My Winnipeg” so perfectly to Mr. Maddin’s style is its focus on the nature of memory, and how the present and the past overlap and obscure each other. Commissioned to make his first documentary by a Canadian television station, Mr. Maddin has shaken the notion of objective and emotional truth and spun the concept of the “documentary” on its head. Many are hailing its presence in an entirely new genre: the docu-fantasia.

As is always the case with Mr. Maddin, this documentary-fabrication-mystery-fantasy opens with the throb of grainy black-and-white and cuts between its various distorted images: a train whistle, a man teetering on the edge of sleep, fluttering nighttime snowflakes. Our hero, appropriately enough, spends the full running time of the movie in a state of semi-consciousness, struggling to rise from his peaceful slumber. Sitting in what appears to be a train (a wonderfully shoddy set piece, consisting only of a table, a chair, and a projection screen that shows footage recorded by someone driving through downtown Winnipeg), we come to learn through his inner narration (provided by Mr. Maddin himself) that he is “sleep-chugging” through his hometown, its history, and his memories.

The conceit of “My Winnipeg” — at once a chronicling of a city, an editorial about a culture, and a mind-trip of one man’s embellished youth — is that Winnipeg is a city of sleepwalkers, literally and figuratively. After Mr. Maddin announces that Winnipeg houses the most sleepwalkers of any city on Earth, he adds that it is illegal there to turn away a sleepwalker who returns to the front door of one of his previous homes. It seems the only thing keeping people in this city is their inability to stay awake long enough to break free; they are constantly drawn back to the comfortable people and places of their past.

Is this actually a law in Winnipeg? Well, that’s the kind of movie this is, persistently mixing fact with fiction and plausibility with poetic license. Shifting from memories of his home — “white, block, house” — to his family, his neighborhood, his boyhood icons, and his loose understandings of Winnipeg’s supernatural history, Mr. Maddin seems more angry than in love with this place. He talks of the socialist movement and takes the side of the workers. He talks of how Winnipeg has decided to bulldoze the arena that once housed its professional hockey team, and launches into a tirade against the desecration of what he deems a holy place.

In support of his argument, he says he was born during a game.

Watching “My Winnipeg” becomes an act of scrutiny. Mr. Maddin tells us his childhood bedroom was located above his mother’s hair salon, and that seems possible. He then says he rented out that very space to film a number of re-creations for this film, casting actors to the play the parts of his siblings. This seems a little less likely. Then, as Mr. Maddin cuts to a close-up of B-movie icon Ann Savage and identifies her not as an actress, but as his actual mother, we realize that fact has melted into pure, deceitful fiction.

Returning to the sleep train, Mr. Maddin yells at his on-screen persona to stay awake, but then loses his focus and veers off on an escalating series of tangents. There’s talk of city planning, of infrastructure (Winnipeg’s bridge was meant to span the Nile), of awkward sexual memories. Using actors, he dramatizes his younger siblings, stages a game of hockey between ghosts, and imagines a mystical séance in City Hall involving a long-gone governor and his inner sanctum.

It’s funny, confusing, confounding, and sweet. And for Mr. Maddin, it is the complete package, affording him a chance to meld the grotesqueries of “Tales From the Gimli Hospital” with the emotional contradictions of “The Saddest Music in the World,” the silent-film wizardry of “The Heart of the World,” and the modern dance of “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.” If this sleep-chugging allows our narrator a chance to purge all of his Winnipeg concerns, then “My Winnipeg” gives Mr. Maddin a similar freedom — a blank palette and a full box of crayons. There is no preparing for “My Winnipeg,” only the act of getting lost in its mist, jostled by its mood swings, and invested in its loving disdain. Home is where the heart is — a wounded, yearning heart.

ssnyder@nysun.com