The Monkey Suit Manifesto: Nina Conti Just Went Full Chaos—and We’re Here for It
“We’re going to leave our old lives behind, tear up the road ahead, and cause a travesty!” says a woman dressed as a monkey, before hopping into an Airstream with a stranger. If that sentence short-circuited your frontal lobe, Sunlight’s trailer is just getting started.
Nina Conti—the British ventriloquist-comedian-turned-filmmaker—has officially dropped the weirdest trailer of 2025, and cinephiles, festival freaks, and people who still quote Napoleon Dynamite are SCREAMING.
Why This Isn’t Just Another Quirky Indie (But Maybe a Cult Classic in Disguise)
Yes, the indie comedy circuit has a well-worn playbook: slap a ukulele over awkward dialogue, throw in some trauma, call it poignant. But Sunlight? This thing breaks the damn typewriter.
Here’s the setup: Jane (Conti), fresh out of a toxic relationship, reinvents herself inside a literal monkey suit. Along the way, she picks up Roy (Shenoah Allen), a suicidal radio host, and the pair hit the American highway in an Airstream with a half-baked scheme that sounds like it was pitched by a sentient Reddit thread.
And it works—somehow.
It’s like Thelma & Louise if they’d stolen a therapy podcast instead of a car, or Swiss Army Man but swapped the corpse for a midlife crisis in a zip-up primate outfit.
The detail that elevates this from oddball to “please submit this to the Criterion Collection immediately”? It’s executive produced by Christopher Guest—yes, Spinal Tap, Best in Show Guest—which all but confirms the movie’s commitment to deadpan chaos.
The Hidden Story: British Absurdism Invades American Trauma Comedy
There’s a lineage here—one that starts with Monty Python, swerves through Withnail & I, and skids into the kind of tragicomic terrain Phoebe Waller-Bridge would explore if Fleabag wore fur.
Conti, best known for her ventriloquism (and her brilliant doc Her Master’s Voice), turns the monkey suit into something strangely mythic: part armor, part escape hatch. It’s not just a gag—it’s a metaphor for erasure, reinvention, and the bizarre power of becoming someone (or something) else to survive.
One review called it “a darkly charming oddity.” That might undersell how deeply Sunlight is playing with identity, freedom, and what it means to be seen—especially when you’re deliberately hiding in a costume.
According to a now-deleted tweet from someone at the Melbourne screening:
“Audience didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So we did both. Then stood up and clapped like weirdos.”
So, Cult Gem or Deranged Disaster?
Here’s the thing: Sunlight isn’t trying to be your next cozy Sunday watch. It’s messy, abrasive, and deeply strange—which might be exactly what the indie scene needs right now.
Would you watch this or burn $20? No judgment. (…Okay, some judgment.)
