Bonobo movie review: of monkeys and (wo)men

Middle-aged, divorced, and seemingly a bit of a stick in the mud, Judith (Tessa Peake-Jones: Doctor Who) is so mortified that her daughter, Lily (Eleanor Wyld: Frequencies), has dropped out of law school to go live at Bonobo House — aka, the local “monkey sex cult” commune in their small English town — that she can barely even admit it to herself, never mind to her snooty, judgy neighbor. But enough is enough, and so Judith heads over to try to convince Lily to drop out of dropping out and get back to her real life. Instead, the commune’s leader, hippie philosophy PhD Anita (Josie Lawrence), convinces Judith to spend the weekend and try to understand their ways, which include feeding one another at every meal and using sex to solve all conflicts (like bonobos do). Things do not go smoothly, as you might imagine, not least of which is because humans are not bonobos but our own weird sort of monkey. This is a gentle, poignant dramedy about getting out of your comfort zone (even if your comfort zone is a monkey sex cult commune) and making new human connections, one that dismisses the stereotype of stodgy English respectability and embraces the reality that personal liberation is still a thing that people — and in particularly women — have to discover for themselves, that we all place constraints on ourselves in ways that it’s sometimes difficult to acknowledge… or that sometimes it’s simply easier, if far less emotionally satisfying, to let ourselves get pushed along in the direction we imagine we’re “supposed” to go. Director Matthew Hammett Knott, who cowrote the script with Joanna Benecke — both are making their feature debuts — also smashes the tropes of microbudget, one-location (this is near enough) films with a wildly original story that’s not like anything we’ve ever seen before. Bonobo is smart, unexpected, and hugely, warmly human — I love this movie.