SUNLIGHT - Mark Reviews Movies

Sunlight, Sunrise Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 5, 2025

The premise of Sunlight sounds like a joke. It's about a radio journalist, who attempts suicide in a motel room, being saved by a woman in a monkey costume, because she has become convinced that she is or, at least, that life would be better lived as a talking monkey. The pure strangeness of this setup might be why co-writers/stars Shenoah Allen and Nina Conti's film turns out to be fairly touching. It's so odd that any attempt at emotional sincerity and honesty comes as a complete surprise.

The film, also directed by Conti, is those things, though, in addition to being quite funny. The mere sight of the actress/co-writer/director in that monkey outfit, with its cute face and flapping mouth moving along with every line, is a solid gag unto itself, so that Conti gives us a compelling character—or, maybe, pair of characters—both in the form of the costume and in the woman within the getup is quite the accomplishment, too.

All of this is so decidedly weird that it's almost refreshing Allen and Conti's script takes the comfortable, familiar form of a road-trip story. After spotting Allen's Roy attempting to hang himself in that motel room, Conti's Monkey/Jane rescues the unconscious man, puts him in the camper in which he arrived, and drives off down a desert road. When Roy awakens, he's as shocked as he was when he spotted a human-sized monkey staring at him through the window of the motel room. Monkey, who speaks with a subtle British accent and cheeky attitude, announces that he wants to go to Colorado to start a new life and form a very niche business venture that, all things considered, actually sounds like a pretty decent idea.

Roy, of course, has no plans of which to speak, since he thought he'd be dead at this point. The only thing he knows he must do now is to get to his mother's house, since he mailed her a suicide note and wants to intercept it before the letter arrives. After that effort fails and proves to Roy that his mother (played by Melissa Chambers) might be more annoyed than relieved by the fact that her son is still alive, he's all in on Monkey's plan.

There are some basic problems with that scheme. For one thing, Roy has no money, since he gave away everything before his suicide attempt, and whatever money Jane may have had before running away from her own life isn't nearly enough for her ambitions. This leads Roy to come up with an idea of his own: to get an expensive watch, presumably worth about $20,000, from his father's grave. In theory, he was supposed to inherit the watch, but as further proof of how his parents have treated him his entire life, the watch Roy actually did get from his old man is a fake. The father wanted to be buried with the real deal.

Most of this is just an excuse for the screenplay to put Roy and Monkey/Jane into the camper, send them off on the road, and let them joke with each other, talk about their lives, and develop a connection that neither of them expected. The dialogue here has an improvised quality, which makes some sense since both of the lead actors have some experience with that sort of comedy (Conti is also, as is apparent from the way she handles the characterization and puppetry of the monkey suit, a trained ventriloquist). Because the two are funny, the back-and-forth gags, such as a made-up song about various bodily holes, are regularly amusing.

More importantly, though, they understand these characters, so there's a real poignancy to Roy's confessions about how unfulfilling his life has seemed, as well as how he's still living in the shadow of his terrible father, and to the intriguing contradiction that is the co-existence of Monkey and Jane. She has her own problems, regrets, and grief—mainly stemming from the death of her mother to cancer and the way the mother's second husband Wade (Bill Wise) infused himself into everything her life was supposed to be.

On the night she found Roy in the motel room, she explains, Jane put on the monkey costume, used to promote Wade's monkey-themed nightclub, and discovered it suited her better than she felt in her own skin. Now, she won't take off the costume, save for certain pieces when she needs to eat or go to the bathroom. Monkey is confident and bold, and Jane is quiet and wholly unsure of herself. It just feels better to be the former and try to forget the latter.

The film keeps revealing more and more about these characters, allowing an initially awkward (There's a good bit about the mechanism used to move the monkey's mouth and his crotch, for example) but ultimately genuine bond to form between these two. If the premise feels like a joke at the start, that's only because the circumstances make it so frankly weird.

Very steadily, though, Allen and Conti's script cuts through the oddity of the setup, without abandoning the blatant humor of it, and gets to the wounded hearts of two people, who don't know what to do with themselves but find some comfort in recognizing that in each other. Sunlight is a legitimate surprise in that way—disarming in both its absurdity and its sense of empathy for characters whose situation could have been nothing beyond a joke.

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