‘Universal Language’ movie review: Lost in translation, found in kindness

Produced in an era crowded with movies about division, Matthew Rankin’s ‘Universal Language’ stands out for its generosity, for the way it insists that compassion is always possible, even in an estranged world built on mistrust

Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is a deadpan daydream, an unplaceable mirage of a film that maps an imagined Iran onto a surrealist Winnipeg. It is at once a cinematic love letter, an identity crisis, and a melancholic joke told with such straight-faced sincerity that it loops back to something surprisingly profound. The filmmaker’s sophomore feature and the Canadian entry to the 2025 Academy Awards offers a collision of influences — Kiarostami, by way of Wes Anderson, filtered through a modernist lens. The result is a stirring story about borders, belonging, and the porousness of cultural memory.

In an alternate version of Quebec and Manitoba, Farsi has supplanted French and English as the dominant language, and Iranian cultural aesthetics have seamlessly blended with the bleakness of Canada’s prairie provinces. The landscape is recognisable, yet unfamiliar — Tim Hortons signs are rendered in elegant Perso-Arabic script, bureaucrats issue Persian formalities behind Quebecois red tape, and a tour guide leads visitors through Winnipeg’s great sites of mundanity, including a long-abandoned briefcase and a defunct mall fountain. If all of this sounds like a thin premise for an extended gag, Rankin is several steps ahead, committing to the bit with an unsettling level of sincerity until the cultural pastiche of nostalgia and displacement bleeds into one another.

It begins with a schoolteacher arriving late to class only to find his students running amok. He chastises them not for their failure to misbehave in proper French. From there, Universal Language becomes a series of interwoven vignettes: two children attempting to chisel a frozen 500 rial currency note out of a block of ice, a hapless government employee (played by Rankin himself) in an existential crisis, and the aformentioned tour guide leading a group through the city’s official landmarks of disinterest. Winnipeg has never looked so delightfully bleak.

Rankin’s Winnipeg features rigid compositions that could double as Soviet propaganda posters. Boxy frames capture characters in stiff, awkward postures against brutalist backdrops of beige brick and concrete, with the occasional pop of primary color in a beanie or scarf. But within this controlled stillness, the film is alive with a series of uncanny valley embellishments: a boy who insists his glasses were stolen by a turkey, a walking Christmas tree bumming cigarettes, the final formalities at a job unfolding beside a man wailing in a cubicle. The film exists in this bizarre liminal space that feels strangely warm and intimate.

Rankin’s tone here feels elegiac, the film’s humor is gentle, and the absurdity more rueful than anarchic. There’s a sadness running beneath the jokes and an awareness that cultural memory is fragile. Rankin also seems keenly aware of the perils of appropriating a visual and narrative language not his own, and navigates them with a light but thoughtful touch. He enlists Iranian-Canadian collaborators Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi as co-writers and executive producers, making sure that the film’s humor never punches down and that its cultural mash-ups are rooted in something sincere. There’s an affection here, beyond just for Iranian cinema, but for the way film itself erases and redraws borders.

In one of the film’s most moving moments, Rankin’s character visits his childhood home, now occupied by a family he’s never met. They welcome him in any way, treating him like one of their own and send him off with ice cream, tea, a bag of walnuts, and one of the warmest hugs I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing at the movies. The scene feels like the perfect encapsulation of Universal Language‘s central idea: that identity is fluid, borders are arbitrary, and the sheer, stubborn hospitality of the Farsi spirit is a force to be reckoned with.

In its final act, the film shifts its deadpan to something more delicate and introspective. Rankin’s character returns home after years away, only to find himself replaced — his childhood memories and his sense of self, all absorbed into a different family, a different version of history. He traces his fingers over height marks on a door jamb, remnants of a life that no longer belongs to him.