The trailer for Cannes standout Universal Language looks freaking awesome

The Matthew Rankin film is about a "mysterious and surreal interzone somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg"

By Emma Keates | August 22, 2024 | 11:14am

Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories

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The trailer for Cannes standout Universal Language looks freaking awesome

After a relatively slow August (with some notable, xenomorph-shaped exceptions), studios are finally starting to gear up for fall and winter, the more awards-focused seasons. Preparing for its theatrical run following its Cannes premiere this past May, Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s weird and wonderful-looking Universal Language fits squarely into that latter category.

This film’s conceit is a little out there, so we’ll let its official synopsis do some of the talking for us. “In a mysterious and surreal interzone somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg, the lives of multiple characters interweave with each other in surprising and mysterious ways,” it reads. “Gradeschoolers Negin and Nazgol find a sum of money frozen in the winter ice and try to claim it. Meanwhile, Massoud leads a group of increasingly-befuddled tourists through the monuments and historic sites of Winnipeg. Matthew quits his meaningless job in a Québecois government office and sets out upon an enigmatic journey to visit his mother. Space, time and personal identities crossfade, interweave and echo into a surreal comedy of misdirection.”

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Set in this curious overlapping place where people hold Canadian citizenship but speak exclusively in Farsi, the film’s lush visuals conjure a similar convergence of style. It’s almost as if the great Iranian “meta-realist” school (including directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Sohrab Shahid-Saless, who Rankin cites as influences) met a very cold Wes Anderson. “I encourage people to think of it as cinematic Venn diagramme [sic] between Winnipeg, Tehran and Montréal. It’s like a confluence of rivers. Or a Hawaiian pizza,” Rankin suggests in the film’s press notes.

The story of the film all comes from Rankin’s “meaningless life,” he explains, noting that parts of the fable were drawn from “my family history, numerous diary entries from my time in Iran,… several mystifying dreams I had about my parents shortly after they died,” and a salient memory of his grandma finding a bill trapped in the ice similarly to two of his characters. “The biopic has long been a major preoccupation of my work as a filmmaker,” he continues. “I describe Une langue universelle as a kind of autobiographical hallucination.”

Universal Language opens in theaters in February 2025.