Actors talk in pompous non-sequiturs, each statement dripping with insight, making less sense than the solemn speech of one grave lecturer whose nonsense syllables are recorded backwards. A guitar mutters quietly when a chord is struck, and a piano moans softly as hands stroke the keys. An actor opens his mouth to bleat the notes of a trumpet (“I didn't know you could speak trumpet!”). A studious looking 12-year-old boy repeats: “What more evidence can there be than the evidence of the senses?”

Snow's film is a “talking picture,” although not in the conventional sense. “So, starting to think about what would be the units of that, like instead of it being dramatic dialogue or comic dialogue I started with the units of syllables and frames. So that the thing is built out in a molecular way, in terms of syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. Everything comes from that. The entire film is itself a sentence, see, so that as far as I'm concerned, it's really a unified speech film, and its subject is partly speech and of course partly language, and that means, partly culture. The film is very complex and consciously made. It was completely scripted by myself. That's not a qualitative statement and it doesn't mean that in many ways it isn't also mysterious to me.”