Genre is usually seen as an aid to orientation: identifying a film's genre situates it in a landscape of other films and assists the viewer in forming appropriate expectations. This very orientational function, however, might render us all the more vulnerable to disorientation. If, in a murder mystery set in the 1920s, suspicion were suddenly to fall on a character we considered already in the clear, we might be surprised but we would not be half as disorientated as we would be if a spaceship suddenly made an appearance. Genre could be said to increase orientation at the price of narrowing the range of what a film can present without provoking disorientation. These issues are, however, complicated by the two films that this chapter will explore because each film contains an unusually large number of nested (or quasi-nested) narratives that are distinguished by genre. There are six in Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 2012) and seventeen in The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, 2015), which are nested within each other to various degrees; at its most extreme Maddin and Johnson's film goes nine stories deep.

How might combining multiple genres in a single film either aid orientation or produce disorientation, and to what end? Both Cloud Atlas and The Forbidden Room have generated intense experiences of disorientation and confusion in viewers. Roger Ebert waxed lyrical about the kind of narrative surrender he believed appropriate to watching Cloud Atlas:

Eric Hynes describes his experience of watching The Forbidden Room at the Sundance film festival as follows: ‘You lose the thread. You lose any sense of time … Looking around the room after the conclusion of The Forbidden Room, I saw looks of bewilderment, joy, and post-hypnosis disorientation, often on the same faces’ (Hynes 2015).