Though it tells endless self-effacing jokes about how boring and bland Canada is, the absurd and quiet Universal Language finds a poetic flipside to this familiar national refrain. Sure, it might be a blanketed tundra, cold, dull, and monotonous, where everything that isn’t snow-white is a shade of beige. But as its landscapes, architecture, communities, storylines, and even people blend together—all speaking Persian, as the film’s love affair with the Iranian New Wave transports its version of Canada to an alternate reality—the bit becomes beautiful.
This slow melt from hands-off wryness to heartfelt sincerity comes from writer-director Matthew Rankin, whose debut kinda-biopic The Twentieth Century picked up Guy Maddin’s “Are Canadians ok?” mantle. The Winnipegger’s surrealism still abounds in this interwoven tale of children (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) trying to free some cash from a block of ice, a government employee (Rankin) attempting to reunite with his mother, and a hapless tour guide (Pirouz Nemati) leading a group through the city’s various points of disinterest. If you ever wanted to see a non-operational mall fountain or a long-abandoned briefcase, buckle up! But opposed to Rankin’s first feature, and many of his media-mashing shorts, Universal Language is surprisingly restrained.
Well, at least to look at. The camera glides across the frozen sidewalk in controlled tracking shots, and stands at an aloof distance to better surround its characters with tall walls of taupe. But what’s in front of the camera can range from a child inexplicably dressed as Groucho Marx to a walking, talking Christmas tree trying to bum a cigarette. The film is also stuck in the ‘80s, which means that everyone looks like a very specific era of Weird Al, and is devoted to evocative juxtapositions that get much weirder than simply seeing Winnipeg landmarks and familiar local realty signs translated into flowing Persian script.
Cemeteries hold services next to busy highways, ice cream stands hawk their wares in a parking garage’s upper tier, and little girls search high and low for a good axe. These irrationalities contain a few barbs—particularly a hilariously detached government exit interview held in the same room as a man wailing in a cubicle—but mostly channel a person fondly recalling all the janky details of home. Especially early, when the film is eye-level with Esmaeili’s glowering stare, the nonsense feels like how a worldweary kid sees adult life. Before settling its perspective on Rankin’s adrift character, the child-focused storylines of Universal Language put a Dadaist spin on A Christmas Story’s bundled-up nostalgia—or translate Sideways Stories From Wayside School through the work of Abbas Kiarostami.
But eventually, Universal Language becomes a “can’t go home again” story, with Rankin’s character (also named Matthew Rankin) finding himself replaced upon his return to Winnipeg after a stint working in Quebec. Visiting the family now living in his childhood home—the family of that Groucho Marx kid from earlier, who dons his greasepaint mustache even in family photos—Matthew gazes wistfully at pencil-drawn height marks on the door jamb. Inside people’s homes, the camera comes close and the colors grow warm. Flowers and fresh-poured tea fill the screen as crossfades add an intimacy the arctic outside rejects.
Matthew might not live in that house anymore, but that family embraces him fully; later, when he finally tracks down his mother, he’s confronted with a more literal substitute. But this uncanniness is just the uncomfortable surface of something sweeter and more compassionate, despite his identity crisis—a crisis that, in the film’s final melancholy turn, connects with Kiarostami’s masterful case of shifting identity, Close-Up. It’s a poetic twist delivered with the same deadpan as characters announcing their silly places of work (the Winnipeg Earmuff Authority, the Kleenex Repository) or mourning loved ones with ridiculous causes of death (like marshmallows and steamrollers). That off-handed delivery connects the strange with the sweet, to find something dreamily spiritual in the stark sepia frames.
As Brianna Zigler wrote when The A.V. Club named Universal Language one of the best movies of 2024 after its brief awards run, the film “articulates an unspoken closeness between its diversity of characters through the blurring of cultural differences, to create a film about how we are all, in a way, each other.” To further dig into Rankin’s blending of the goofily left-field and the openly earnest, the message persisting through the dry punchlines is that to care for your neighbor, to care for all the oddities of home, is to care for yourself.
Director: Matthew Rankin
Writer: Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, Matthew Rankin
Starring: Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi, Sobhan Javadi, Pirouz Nemati, Mani Soleymanlou, Danielle Fichaud, Matthew Rankin
Release Date: February 14, 2025
