It is perhaps an unexpected development that one of the most erotic moments in cinema this year is a frottage scene involving a woman half-dressed as a monkey. By this point in comedian Nina Conti’s directorial debut, there is already a heady backlog of sexual tension inside a camper van between suicidal radio host Roy (Shenoah Allen) and the monkey (Nina Conti) who saved him from stringing himself up in a New Mexico motel room. He’s understandably curious to find out who’s underneath the get-up and the persona that comes with it – a profane blowhard who holds forth on everything around them in the stuffy middle-England tones of Anne Robinson.
The simian lets some stuff slip about her inner human: she used to be Jane, who worked as nightclub mascot for her abusive stepfather Wade (Bill Wise) and began to associate too much with her costume. After her mother’s death from cancer, she then self-destructively shacked up with Wade; having decided to flee his clutches, she insists Roy take her to a Colorado lake where she plans to set up a banana pontoon business. He has his own reckoning planned: going to the graveyard and digging up his hated father to recover a luxury watch with which he will finance her lake-leisure dreams.
As Wade pursues them on his racing bike, which is the spur for this consistently guffawsome escapade, the monkey gets the best lines: “Your dad’s not going to dig himself up.” But it’s quickly obvious that this parody road trip is driven by real pain – particularly when Roy starts to move in closer. “Jane’s leaving it up to me now. She died last night – just like you,” cautions the monkey, who is a kind of inverse ventriloquist’s puppet; responsible, rather than a raging id. Much like Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank, Conti and co-writer Allen are making fundamentally serious points about identity and alter egos compartmentalising trauma.
Conti’s camerawork sometimes feels a bit uncertain – perhaps appropriately for a story about someone making a makeshift life as a monkey. And the denouement comes a touch too easily, not quite entangling us in the complications of Jane’s hominid transition as much as it might. But these are minor quibbles when Conti manages the feat of being funny, emotionally astute and kinda sexy throughout.
