Sally Sallies Forth: A Chimp, a Camera, and a Lot of Nothing

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you are a film historian or you have a weirdly specific obsession with monkeys from the 1920s. Everyone else? You’re going to be bored to tears within five minutes.

If you prefer your movies to have, you know, a plot, stay far away from this. It feels like someone just turned on a camera and hoped for the best while Sally poked at a tree stump.

The whole thing feels incredibly loose. There isn't much of a script, just a chimp doing chimp things in the English countryside. It makes My Sorrel Horse look like a high-octane thriller by comparison.

At one point, Sally just sits there eating something. The camera doesn't cut away. It just keeps rolling. For a long time. You can almost see the cameraman wondering if he remembered to pack a sandwich.

Oddly specific observations:

• The way Sally looks directly into the lens is actually kind of unnerving. It’s like she knows she’s the star of this weird little experiment.
• The rural English background is nice, I guess. Very green. Lots of mud.
• There’s a moment where a hat gets stolen. It’s the closest thing to a 'joke' in the entire runtime.

I found myself thinking about The Iron Man just to cleanse my palate with something that actually had a structure. This film is just so unapologetically aimless.

Sometimes you watch a movie and you realize the person behind the camera was just having a lark. That's fine! But charging admission for it feels like a bit of a stretch, even a hundred years later.

The pacing is non-existent. It just stops and starts based on whatever the chimp felt like doing that afternoon. You don't watch this for the story. You watch it to see a monkey trip over a rock.

Whatever. It’s an artifact. A weird, hairy, noisy little artifact. 🐒