Indy Film Fest: Sylvio

A surreal, sublime trip into a fantasy world where a gorilla (or at least a man dressed as a gorilla) lives a normal adult life, "Sylvio" is a fun slice of absurdity, a melancholy look at a character.

A simple gorilla working as a debt collector — he works with the aid of a program that "speaks" for him — Sylvio finds himself a guest on an underground TV talk / variety show, where he performs a puppet show. It doesn't go well, but an accident on a subsequent visit propels Sylvio to stardom when he accidentally breaks something. The audience goes wild, and thus is born a segment where Sylvio simply breaks things.

But he finds stardom to be a strange beast unto itself, and his celebrity becomes a cage in which Sylvio is trapped.

The genesis of this rather unique film is predictably kooky; this is a feature-length adaptation of the "Simply Sylvio" series of Vine videos, in itself a funky oddity. But the fact that this film works is a testament to the malaise-of-everyday-life vision of co-writers / directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, and their willingness to go all the way with the public acceptance of Sylvio as a gorilla. That we as an audience can come to accept that a gorilla who doesn't speak could become a functioning member of society is a testament to the "world" they are able to build within the film (though hardly the type of rich cinematic universe, this plays more like they built a small town).

Sylvio has an undercurrent of sadness to him, someone who wants to escape the dreariness of life and embrace the promises childhood makes to us all — fame, fortune, love and happiness. Instead, Sylvio largely ambles about performing lonely tasks, hanging out in cheap clothes performing menial, repetitive tasks, and finding fulfillment in none of it.

In the continuing era of sequels and big-budget franchises, "Sylvio" is the very definition of the "something different" audiences complain we don't have, a spiritual kin to some of the early works of the Duplass brothers, for example. It's an insightful film at times if not terribly brilliant, a film that evokes chuckles if not out-and-out belly laughs, and it's certainly more than worth the time it takes to watch it.