Aaaaaaaah!

Steve Oram's directorial debut Aaaaaaaah! is brilliantly bonkers. Described by Oram as Romeo and Juliet meets Planet of the Apes, the film contains no human dialogue but has all it's actors speak and act like monkeys. Oram actually wrote a complete script for the film in English that the actors then translated into grunts and gibberish.

It's the second film of the year to abandon traditional dialogue after Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe, a Ukrainian film set in a school for the deaf in which all the characters communicated with sign language, and once again shows us how much more interesting it can be when films don't rely on spoken dialogue to tell a story.

Aaaaaaaah! is a subversive, boundary pushing anarchic comedy whose central conceit never wears thin. What could have come across as a gimmick is a fully realized alternative universe with wonderful attention to detail that includes showing us the computer games the monkey people play and the sitcoms and cookery programmes they watch on TV. The poster by Jay Shaw is brilliant too.

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