I was dreading this film quite a bit, as I always do when non-Iranian directors make films about Iranian culture. As it turns out, my concerns were completely baseless: Universal Language is a brilliant, whimsical and inventive film whose mere existence feels wondrous.

Set in a fictional Winnipeg where Persian is the native language, decades-old Iranian music reigns supreme on the airwaves, and a Tim Horton’s double-double order means a cup of tea straight from the samovar with sugar cubes,…

It's no mean feat to invent a whole new cinematic language through which bourgeois ennui and emotional detachment and existential crises can be studied by purely visual means, or to convey human emotions and psyches through landscape and architecture and, very often, without words altogether. This is a film in which the sight of a decaying monument or the sound of church bells or the smallest gesture of a hand can signify a world of meaning. I used to think…

Very few films have made me feel so hot and cold during a screening, sometimes even within the space of a few seconds in a single scene. How can a filmmaker capable of something as tender and genuine as that dinner scene with Remi's parents leave the rest of his film riddled with so many clichés and formulaic dramatic beats?

The mid-film twist feels like a needlessly mean-spirited device to emotionally manipulate the audience, and its scale is unmerited by…