When a small-town gorilla joins a local TV program, some on-air mishaps threaten to shatter his identity, sending him on an adventure of self-discovery where reality and fantasy start to blend.
Bernardi is an actor of genius; his Janus-faced pantomime, as Sylvio struggles voicelessly for a place among human chatterboxes, channels the infinite grace of the great silent-film comedians.
This charming lo-fi indie from actor-director Kentucker Audley and director Albert Birney is attuned to its own eccentric wavelength, equal parts absurd and poignant.
Sylvio has stray moments of beauty that border on the sublime. There's a yearning to the hairy guy's amazingly uneventful puppet shows, a dream of sophistication that transcends his animal brutishness.
One of Sylvio's greatest strengths is the ever-present, though never fully verified sense that Birney and Audley are having a long laugh at their audience's expense.
Sylvio's banal depictions of everyday loneliness through the diurnal tedium of an anthropomorphic animal brings to mind BoJack Horseman, but without the caustic navel-gazing and self-destruction or the mordant pop-culture musings.
