The follow-up to his anarchic debut feature The Twentieth Century, a postmodern restaging of Canadian history that eschewed accuracy and realism in favor of strange psycho-sexual fetishes and aesthetic fixations, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language takes a similarly irreverent approach to depicting his country’s geography and socio-political environment.

The film initially centers on what appears to be an Iranian middle school, albeit one situated in an incongruously wintry landscape, where an irate teacher (Mani Soleymanlou), ranting at his misbehaving pupils, asks them, “Can’t you at least fool around in French?!” We soon follow two young girls (Saba Vahedyousefi and Rojina Esmaelli) who set out to retrieve a banknote stuck inside a frozen puddle, as Rankin’s sophomore effort gradually reveals itself to be set in a parallel-universe Canada that recalls 1980s Iran as envisioned by one of the auteurs of the Iranian New Wave. Meanwhile, a character named...