They aren’t really films at all. They are fiery effulgences from another dimension, deceptively routed through Winnipeg, Canada. They hit the earth like meteorites, blinding onlookers and cratering cultural history. Yet if you’re not in the zone, sensibility-wise, you may not see them at all.

His work is like music as much as movies, going straight to the emotional bloodstream while affirming some icy, ideal mathematics of the brain.

Who am I talking about? Guy Maddin. He is the most bewitching experimental director of our time. If you don’t know his work, you should. I have loved it for years. I suspect, or hope, the world is on the verge of doing the same. Maddin made Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful (one of this critic’s top ten films of all time), The Heart of the World (most praised short film of recent years) and now Brand upon the Brain! (masterpiece in search of a world mooring).

He is a visionary whose time has come, even if time is taking its time to realise it. But what is a prophet if not without honour? Let me say, with amazed pity, that the only Maddin DVD I have found in Britain is the relatively conventional The Saddest Music in the World, which sells because Isabella Rossellini’s and Kazuo Ishiguru’s names appear on the jacket. She stars, he wrote the original script.

Brand Upon the Brain!, which had a “live” show at the Deutsche Oper Berlin during this year’s Berlin Film Festival (full orchestra and an in-person Isabella Rossellini narrating), is great Maddin and barely available anywhere. My suspicion: it is too great. At Berlin, people either staggered out as if they had seen the Holy Grail or left the theatre in benumbed indifference.

But that’s the thing with the Grail: you have to recognise it. To the unready, these sacred goblets can look like any old beaker. Brand Upon the Brain! could be thought a mere berserker impromptu. It is in virtual monochrome; it is silent with intertitles (and music and narration); it is cut as if by a demented tailor (in some scenes several snips per second); and it is so “retro” – styled like a D.W. Griffith melodrama rearranged by a man practising free association – that its wear-and-tear touches include artfully distressed film stock and jumpy splices.

But the Maddin style grows on you. He makes surrealised autobiographies. They involve troubled family backgrounds – stressed siblings, dodgy parents, weird or spooky mentors – and take place in a world of secrecy or repression. Careful, shot with an entranced preciosity like a Lotte Reiniger shadow movie with live humans, is set in an Alpine village where everyone must speak softly in case an avalanche is set off. Cowards Bend the Knee is about an ice hockey hero (called Guy Maddin) with a deadly secret. The protagonist of Brand Upon the Brain!, also called Guy, is hurled by fate upon the lighthouse island of his childhood, where flashback-memories – tyrannical mum rasping orders from the lighthouse top, mad-inventor dad – assail him like the sea’s surges.

The silent melodrama mode Maddin favours is at once hysterically funny and deadly serious. The plots are sombre essays in Sturm und Drang. Yet no sane person could miss the comedy – nor would Maddin want him to – in the crazed close-ups, archaic iris shots and oracular intertitles. You needn’t know Griffith and co (though it helps) to giggle at titles such as “Nectarite! Harvested from the brain!” or “Mother used suicide threats as her primary teaching aid”.

Most of these intertitles have exclamation marks. So does Maddin’s entire cinema. It is a raptured utterance disguised as yarn-spinning. It is a mad yea-saying at bay amid the world’s nay-sayings. It is all about growing up in a world that doesn’t want you to. The only comparable prophet-madmen in cinema are Werner Herzog and Lars von Trier and neither has forged an aesthetic as original and organic as Maddin’s.

How did this style start? I ask Maddin himself, having cornered the 51-year-old Winnepegger for an interview after years of worship from afar. I meet him briefly in Berlin, then follow up with a long transoceanic phone call.

“Silent movies are better at melodrama and reverie. I had a dreamy life as a child, I could never make myself wake up entirely, and silent film by the nature of being non-verbal is more oneiric. For me, stories are basically fairy tales. Even the best neo-realist films like Bicycle Thieves or Shoeshine are more fairy tales than communist tracts. And the beautiful thing about fairy tales is you can read them from any culture and still find yourself in them.”

With little money and almost no commercial track record – just plaudits from festivals and art circuits – Maddin has sometimes depended on fairy-tale circumstances to fund his films. “I was busy teaching in Ontario when I got a phone call at midnight from Seattle. Some guy says, ‘Would you like to make a film? We’ll pay for all the stock, processing, sets and costumes. We’re the only not-for-profit film company in the world. All you have to do is fly in, land and shoot the movie.’ ”

Maddin flew in and shot Brain! “It had to be a feature because I didn’t have time to make a short” – a Maddin paradox – “and so I decided to cannibalise huge chunks from my own life, though at first that seemed so self-centred that I tried to disguise it. The hero was called Bruno before I changed it to Guy.” (Bruno? Guy? Aren’t those the criss-cross murderers in Strangers on a Train? Wheels within intertextual wheels . . . )

“I shot it in nine days. When editing came, it lasted three months. I was broke and became so frustrated I threw my cameras in the river.”

Maddin sees life as a fairy tale but also as a Greek tragedy. Accidents begin comically, then become cosmic. It’s no anomaly that the family in Brain!, like those in Careful and Cowards Bend the Knee, are knotted with tensions and cursed by conflicts. Maddin’s own brother committed suicide. His father accidentally lost an eye, when a baby, to the brooch-pin on his mother’s chest. And Maddin’s own mother – who inspired the awful-hilarious possessive gorgon in Brand!, who spies on her children from a creaking, gimballed throne atop the lighthouse – prompts him to a dramatising eloquence worthy of his own movies.

“Charges should have been laid, somewhere along the line,” he says of his parenting. “In Euripides, when Medea murders her own children, then mounts a flaming chariot and flies into the sky – I’ve seen my mother do that.”

Stylistically Brand!, like all Maddin’s best work, blends elegiac ante- diluvianism with manic ellipsis. “I go skipping over the story like a stone over water. Sometimes I realise I’m going too quickly and go back or slow down to develop something. Then I’ll skip ahead again, in a subliminal flash-forward.”

The style reached its apogee in The Heart of the World, which won a contest to become the official “logo-movie” at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. Riffing on the futuristic-apocalyptic style of early Eisenstein or Lang, with a story about the world having a heart attack, its editing tempo is two cuts per second. “I knew if a film was going to play 80 times at the festival, it couldn’t be a film you ‘got’ after one viewing. It takes about 10 viewings to follow it, then you’ll still be finding things.”

Maddin sometimes slows down. Working with Isabella Rossellini has helped, a calming avatar from cinema’s ancestry. “We just got to know each other real quickly on Saddest Music. We became muses to each other. We had fun shocking each other and thinking up childish things to do. Then we made a film tribute to her dad” – the marvellous fantasised documentary about Roberto Rossellini, My Dad is 100 Years Old – “and had such a good time doing that, I invited her to narrate Brand!”

The vatic intensity of Rossellini’s mezzo-voiced commentary helps the film to its tragicomic highs. Who else could give such exotic conviction to exclamatory transports such as “What’s a suicide attempt without a wedding!” or “Painting, brooding! Always brooding, painting!” as Guy begins the magisterially daft endeavour of repainting the entire lighthouse, as if to conceal, or perhaps to reify anew, his past.

“People don’t think you can’t combine opposite moods,” Maddin says about blending the grave with the gaga. “But Shakespeare – not that I’m comparing myself – mixed the comical and tragical. I’ve always tried to throw every kind of different thing at the screen.”

It helps to have grown up with every kind of cinema. “My teenage years were like Fellini’s I Vitelloni. For four or five years, a bunch of friends and I hung out or sat around watching movies. Metropolis, L’Age d’Or . . . I must have watched Foolish Wives 60 times. The scene where Von Stroheim drinks ox’s blood from a champagne glass! Then we started talking, some of us, about making our own movies one day. So it all comes from a stunted-growth period in my life when I should have had a job but, instead, spent time with overgrown children watching 16mm prints of silent films.”

What’s an artist without stunted growth? They are all neurotics of varied kinds, creating pearls from setbacks, traumas or psychosexual irritants. Maddin’s films are such kitsch-laden cris de coeur that I was wrongly convinced, around the time of Careful, that he was gay. Who else but a “friend of Dorothy” could make movies camper than a yellow brick road? These include his great short films, Sissy Boy Slap Party and Sombra Dolorosa (both on the Saddest Music in the World DVD).

All human life is here, and then some. But Maddin isn’t gay, he is just brilliant. He reinvents cinema as one might reinvent the wheel. His best summing-up of his own aims as a filmmaker, and of his primitivist style, comes in his Saddest Music work diary, accessible on the internet. Every artist, and every human, should read it as a manifesto on what artistic innovation is about. It concludes: “I want to unlearn how to watch movies; I want to flip dyslexically the images of my film to jangle their readability for the viewer; I want to recreate the thrill I felt as a boy when I finally recognised three words in a row.”

To leap forward, first step back. The best jumpers take the longest runs. Or if they don’t, they take them in their imaginations.

Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic