Project Nim

In a nutshell: Thought-provoking monkey business

Popcorn rating: 4.5/5 

Mention chimpanzees, and some bore will tell you they share 99 per cent of our DNA. So… does that mean they could learn to talk? Project Nim is a documentary about a chimp who, back in the 70s, was supposed to answer that question. Snatched with heartrending cruelty from his mother, Nim is borrowed by academic Herbert Terrace and raised by the hippy intellectual equivalent of the Brady Bunch before he’s whisked off to a mansion where ‘tutors’ in bell-bottoms attempt to teach him sign language.

Told through captivating archive footage, interviews with the humans concerned and some short dramatised sequences, Nim’s true story has all the dramatic highs and lows of fiction and a large cast of real-life heroes, villains and misguided idiots. Short, balding Terrace, who dined out on the publicity from his project for years, is particularly unappealing, although as it’s the 70s his Alan Partridge tennis shorts and limp moustache apparently make him irresistible to his nubile 18-year-old assistant.

Almost everyone interviewed professes to have loved Nim, which is actually the most frustrating thing about the film. Because for them, ‘loving’ Nim meant dressing him up like a doll, feeding him a diet of sugary junk and being inexplicably surprised when the cute infant chimp became an aggressive, testosterone-fuelled five-foot adult with the strength of six men. When Nim starts to bite chunks out of people like, you know, an actual chimpanzee, the project is abandoned and Nim is dumped at the grim primate breeding centre he came from. Oh, and the centre’s chief income comes from selling chimps for clinical trials.

Like all the best stories, Nim’s tale is never predictable – the only person who really understands him is actually a lanky stoner at the chimp farm, and the man who frees him and many other chimps from the vivisection lab is, incredibly, the doctor who runs the place. Similarly, an animal sanctuary isn’t quite what we’d hope, and when the adult Nim is reunited with his adoptive human mother – well, his reaction isn’t quite the expected one.

Project Nim is fascinating, startling and visually arresting throughout. Watch it after Rise of the Planet of the Apes for an alternate take on our complicated relationship with our closest primate cousins.

But wait! I hear you ask. What about the sign language? Does Nim really learn to talk? Well, as it turns out, nobody knows if he actually acquired language, or simply did tricks for bananas like a chimp in a PG Tips ad. But either way, when listless, lonely Nim gets a visit after many miserable years in solitary confinement from his only true human friend Bob, I don’t think it’s an accident that he signs ‘hug’ and ‘play’.

Reviewer: JoSheppard