Universal Language, 2025, 99 mins
There’s something pleasantly radical about Universal Language. From its first image—a static, snowbound school exterior, echoing with the tormenting voice of a tyrannical teacher—the film is committed to distancing—not just spatially, but epistemologically. The audience is denied a clear entry point or contextual anchor, and there is no explanatory preface or introduction. The setting is Winnipeg, a regional city in Manitoba, Canada, but the characters are Iranian, speaking Farsi throughout, only occasionally dipping into French. This juxtaposition is never explained through backstory or migration narrative—instead, it feels like a non-realist transposition, as if Iranian life were staged within a Canadian shell. Although the plot unfolds obliquely, the narrative centres on three distinct yet gradually interwoven threads. First, Negin and Nazgol, primary school-age sisters, discover a 500-rial note frozen in sidewalk ice, and spend the day methodically attempting to extract it so they can help a classmate afford new glasses. Meanwhile, Matthew, a mild-mannered white civil servant, quits his unfulfilling job and wanders home to his estranged, ailing mother. A third thread features Massoud, a quirky tour guide leading tourists through banal landmarks. While the protagonists bump into one another throughout the story, it is only in the film’s concluding act that the three streams finally converge in Matthew’s uncanny reunion with his mother. Our protagonists encounter an assortment of strange, rigidly ordered institutions—a flower shop, a school, a tea house—each governed by its own set of cryptic rules. Their journeys are made up of surreal encounters with eccentric characters: officious bureaucrats, flower and turkey salesmen, and eventually, each other. Matthew is played by the director himself, Matthew Rankin; Winnipeg is his hometown, and with it, he constructs an environment where recognition is structurally deferred, and estrangement becomes the basic grammar of experience.
What emerges from this geographical and cultural rift is not a simple allegory; there’s no resolution of one world into the other, leaving fractures visible. Authority here is not villainously and centrally imposed but diffuse and embedded in the design of daily life. The flower shop is filled with handwritten warnings on paper and Post-it notes. The school offers punishment in place of education. Bureaucrats in government offices mouth slogans about ‘freedom of expression’ while enacting petty censorship. The simple meanings of actions are everywhere obscured, and yet the film’s atmosphere is never heavy-handed. Its critique is felt as ambient absurdity. Nor is it satire. Instead, Universal Language hardens into a kind of melancholic realism, a meditation on the way control persists even after ideology has stopped pretending to justify itself.
Architecture dominates the film’s visual language. Buildings are shot in symmetrical, static frames like a Wes Anderson film drained of whimsy. Rankin’s geometry isn’t nostalgic—it’s disciplinary. Concrete schoolyards, fluorescent-lit malls, and boxy civic buildings loom with the bland anonymity of North American public infrastructure. Still, there’s a distinctly Canadian bleakness to it: expansive, over-lit interiors with minimal ornamentation, institutional greys and beiges, and an atmosphere of bureaucratic sterility heightened by the Winnipeg winter. Every space bears down on the characters, who seem dwarfed by structural scale and institutional alienation. The flower shop is a forest of prohibitions, written on torn notebook paper taped to everything, making requests: ‘Speak softly, flowers are sensitive’. The tea house enforces ritual, its attendants vigilant, its occupants mute in compliance. In the mall, an elegiac mural—depicting a former Manitoban Premier and Justin Trudeau in 70s regime propaganda style—proclaims in Farsi, ‘A strong economy helps prevent feelings of worthlessness’. These strictures initially appear as eccentricities. But the absurd isn’t the opposite of order here. It’s what order becomes when it no longer bothers to explain itself.
Midway through the film, the tone shifts. Music enters for the first time in a scene of sentimental return for Matthew, who visits what was once his family home, now inhabited by strangers who welcome him warmly. Rankin uses non-professional actors, long takes and minimal dialogue to draw out an atmosphere of gentle ambiguity, where emotional resonance is conveyed through pacing and gesture rather than plot. However, the film’s gestures toward history resist narrative: the Louis Riel monument—commemorating the Métis leader, resistance fighter, and founder of Manitoba—is presented not as a site of reconciliation but as a windblown interstice where cars pass and time dissolves. The monument itself is a squat, tombstone-like structure standing alone beside a freeway ramp. According to Rankin, ‘cinema is always a simulacrum’. Seen in this light, the director’s self-insertion isn’t indulgent but entirely consistent with ‘scepticism about the possibility of authenticity in cinema’.
Where the early movements of Universal Language are concerned with structural control, its final act lets the irrational surface. After a series of increasingly disconnected encounters, such as a moment when Matthew and his tour group pause by a fountain in an empty mall, only to be swiftly moved on by a sudden, inexplicable police presence, the film transitions without explanation to a surreal figure skating sequence: a lone skater glides through a vast, empty arena, illuminated in theatrical light, moving with ceremonial precision at once graceful and unsettling. The scene is dreamlike and symbolic, and its connection to Matthew remains ambiguous—he is present, perhaps as witness or dreamer, but no context is provided. The sequence—a genuine visual splendour—erupts not from liberation but guilt for what we soon learn has been left behind. At the climax, Matthew returns to his abandoned and vulnerable mother to find that Massoud, the well-meaning tour guide, has replaced him in his mother’s aging memory by tending to her so thoroughly that she no longer distinguishes between son and substitute. The reunion carries no sense of restoration; it registers instead as displacement, a reminder that even intimacy can be quietly reassigned. And while the film’s ‘race-shifting’ technique, in which characters change ethnicity mid-scene, might risk flattening identity into metaphor, a comforting ambiguity is maintained: memory and selfhood are porous, unsettled domains.
Universal Language was selected as Canada’s submission to the Academy Awards. That’s a curious irony; it’s hard to imagine a film less interested in national representation or legibility. It is a rare object: formally audacious, conceptually risky, and deeply attuned to how repression operates less through ideology than through ambient enforcement—signs, routines, minor humiliations. Its politics are not announced but embedded in protocols and postures. Rankin has created something that is neither entirely allegorical nor entirely realistic, and it is not universal in a naïvely programmatic sense. Its disinterest in the national is its keenest strength. But in its quiet absurdities, it circles something uncomfortably familiar. The alienation it depicts is not foreign. It is structurally legible to anyone living under bureaucratic liberalism, only naturalised differently. We, too, are policed by language, trapped in signs, and made to ration our own swing time. That the onscreen world appears ‘Iranian’ is partly the trick. The subject is what connects us: not the ‘language’ of the title, but control itself. And in that shared disorientation and Negin and Nazgol’s youthful resistance to it, something like solidarity flickers into view.
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