By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Matthew Rankin
Year: 2026
Running time: 105
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt42443155/
Chris says: “Winnipeg native Matthew Rankin’s second feature UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE was my favorite film of 2025. Imagining a Canada colonized by Iran, it was inventive, absurd, sidesplitting and in the end, oddly affecting. One could apply those descriptors in varying degrees to this follow up, but it does not do either film justice to compare them to each other. One depicts a topsy-turvy parallel universe with human nature still propelling it forward; the other posits that a former prime minister’s pickled brain is being kept alive in a glass jar, grandly exhibited as if it was The Wizard of Oz.
“Where to begin with LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY? A kaleidoscopic collage film feverishly packed with found footage and matching re-creations, it tracks the rise of our Quebec-born titular star from him first running for office and placing second on the ballot of the 1976 Progressive Conservative Convention leadership election to becoming Canada’s 18th Prime Minister in 1984. A congenial if unremarkable populist who today scans as sort of a right-wing Bill Clinton, Mulroney’s persona is perfect clay for Rankin to shape him as an unlikely conservative rock star. What unspools often feels as if Ken Russell circa TOMMY made a documentary about Gerald Ford.
“The delirious use of period-inspired graphics and era-specific television tropes (the structure resembles a multi-episode, for-broadcast docu-series with cheeky nods to pop culture recognizable to anyone alive at that time) are so much fun to watch but they’re also a trojan horse, easing the viewer into the esoteric inner workings of Canadian politics. Footage of dowdy former PM John Diefenbacker is gleefully manipulated for him to appear as more of an evil foil to our hero than even the omniscient floating head of opposition party deity Pierre Trudeau. Rankin isn’t praising Mulroney, exactly, just demonstrating how the cult of personality towards national leaders was alive and kicking long before it all but defined some contemporary culprits.
“His first feature TWENTIETH CENTURY did similar service to Canadian PM William Lyon King roughly 70-80 years before. If that film often felt a little too heavily indebted to fellow Winnipeg auteur Guy Maddin’s silent-cinema shtick, this one revels in an entirely different aesthetic that, especially after the leftfield UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, further establishes Rankin as no mere Maddin imitator but his rightful successor. 4.5 cats
“(My last TIFF26 film and my first ever Midnight Madness screening.)”