Sundance Film Festival 2011: Project Nim

Robert Redford's love of documentary has been well, er, documented, to the extent that the range of of the 2011 edition of the Sundance Film festival has been extended to include even more of them. The funny thing is, though, since Redford's independent showcase first brokered the likes of Hoop Dreams back in the day, a new kind of documentary has appeared – the kind that, in the wake of the wilfully transgressive Catfish, I'm Still Here and Exit Through The Gift Shop, reflect the way in which the form is evolving. Some might say these films aren't docs at all, but, to an extent, it is quite arguable that all these films, with varying degrees of success, investigate the possibility of finding truth in shades of grey rather than traditional black and white.

Some people might level the same accusations of fakery at James Marsh's Project Nim, which showed on opening night in the World Documentary Competition strand. True, some scenes are staged, but then so were many moments of Marsh's Oscar-winning Man On Wire. However, this is not the same animal at all. Man On Wire used recreation to turn the true story of Philippe Petit – the French street artist who illegally staged a tightrope walk between New York's Twin Towers in 1974 – into a gripping heist movie with echoes of Jules Dassin's 1955 bank-robbery classic Rififi. Project Nim, however, uses the same practice to much more sinister end. Though it is based on fact, Marsh's follow-up has more in common with his little-seen 1999 debut, Wisconsin Death Trip, a surreal, almost narcotic study of (real) morbidity and madness in 19th-century America.

If Wisconsin Death Trip was mysterious, magical and gothic, Project Nim really opens the shutters wide. It's the closest thing I can imagine to a walking JG Ballard novel, a chilling story of mad science that would sound like a bad TV movie adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story if it wasn't historically documented. Marsh's film charts the sad life of Nim, a male chimpanzee who was wrenched from his mother's arms in the mid-70s to become part of a pioneering experiment to test the age-old arguments about nature versus nurture. Placed with a human mother and isolated from his species, Nim was to be raised as a human child, and, since chimps lack the facial muscles that enable speech, he was to be taught sign language, enabling him to communicate his “feelings”.

That was the theory. But since nobody really knew what a chimpanzee's feelings were likely to turn out to be, Project Nim quickly became a shocking catalogue of wishy-washy free-thinking and science-led insensitivity. Like Grizzly Man, the film establishes an image of nature that is at odds with our cosy, anthropomorphic view – though certainly cute at times, Nim is an alarming presence in the extensive archive footage – and those charmed by the cute PG Tips-stye promotional shots for the movie (see above) will be in for something of a shock. But what Marsh captures quite brilliantly, to my mind, are the undercurrents of the story: the jaded bohemian attitudes of the participants, the simmering sexual charges that run throughout, and the sheer feral violence of an animal wronged.

Over 24 hours of travelling dulled my senses somewhat, but Project Nim definitely disturbed me in a way I wasn't expecting. It's like an old trashy sci-fi paperback brought to life, with a blood-curdling Crime Against God experiment, rampant inappropriate eroticism and a near-biblical moral, but Marsh wryly assembles these elements in a film that is both upsetting and poetic, with that elusive strain of Ballardian humour we don't see enough of these days. Oscar fodder it probably isn't, but, as a step up from Man On Wire, it's a sublime wrong-footer.