Universal Language (2024 film)

Universal Language (Une langue universelle, ) is a 2024 Canadian comedy-drama film, co-written and directed by Matthew Rankin.

The film had its world premiere at the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, on 18 May 2024.

Plot
Described as a "surreal comedy of disorientation" set "somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg", the film blends the seemingly unrelated stories of Negin and Nazgol, who find money frozen in ice and try to claim it; Massoud, a tour guide in Winnipeg who is leading a confused and disoriented tour group; and Matthew (Rankin), who quits his unfulfilling job with the provincial government of Quebec and travels home to Winnipeg to visit his mother.

Cast

 * Rojina Esmaeili
 * Saba Vahedyousefi
 * Sobhan Javadi
 * Pirouz Nemati
 * Mani Soleymanlou
 * Danielle Fichaud

Release
The film premiered at the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the program's first Audience Award.

Critical response
Fionnuala Halligan of Screen Daily wrote that the film "is doggedly eccentric, something that’s mirrored in its exaggerated aesthetic. There’s a pink cowboy-hatted singing turkey-shop worker; a man wandering around wearing a lit Christmas tree over his body; an absurdist bingo hall where men and women are interchangeable. Inside a pharmacy, all the labels are a generic Adam Stockhausen tribute — only they’re beige. There’s also a ‘Kleenex repository’ and reference made to a ‘Winnipeg Earmuff Authority’. Sad-eyed characters say things like: “My son choked to death in a marshmallow-eating contest,” or “she was flattened in a steamrolling accident”.You could call it whimsical. Absurdist. Contrived. Or an unexpectedly unusual concept album that doesn’t quite come off but was worth the effort. And you would be correct every time."

Writing for Indiewire, David Ehrlich noted that the film "is first and foremost a testament to the shared artifice of all filmic storytelling, and to the singular realities it’s able to bring alive in turn. "

In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri called the film the best he had seen at Cannes and "a magnificent film, one that feels warm and familiar even as we realize just how startlingly original it is. "