Her Master's Voice
Trailer
Synopsis
Nina Conti, ventriloquist, travels to Kentucky carrying the puppet collection left to her by her mentor and former lover, Ken Campbell, bound for Vent Haven—a museum that preserves the dummies of deceased performers. Her monkey Monk and a figure fashioned after Campbell himself become the only voices through which she can approach grief and a relationship too complicated to face directly. An intimate, often unsettling documentary about what happens when the dummy becomes the most honest presence in the room.
Context & Trivia
The puppets are the true dramatic and technical spine of the film. Monk, a hand monkey whose voice carries a faint Sean Connery inflection, externalises Conti's rawest thoughts—doubt, desire, stage anxiety. The second central puppet is a figure built around Campbell's unmistakable features—thick eyebrows, long nose—which Conti uses to hold literal conversations with the dead. A third key dummy is Granny, an old woman she inherited from Campbell and later replicated for her own regular act; the film stands as the documentary record of that character's origin.
The film also works as a technical document of the craft: performer Kevin Johnson demonstrates on camera the technique he calls 'bifurcation', in which lips and tongue move independently to articulate difficult sounds without opening the mouth—the kind of detail that makes the film a reference point for anyone wanting to understand ventriloquism's real mechanics beyond surface illusion.
Executive producer Christopher Guest had already featured Conti and Monk in For Your Consideration (2006) and would collaborate with them again on HBO's Family Tree (2013).
Watch full content
Puppeteers
Lynn T. Miller, Todd Stockman, Jeff Dunham, Jay Johnson, Nina Conti
Voices
Nina Conti, Jim Broadbent, Bob Hoskins
Direction
Joanna Priestley
Cast
Lynn T. Miller, Todd Stockman, Jeff Dunham, Jay Johnson, Nina Conti, Shari Lewis, Paul Winchell, Edgar Bergen
Do you know more about this work?
Are you credited on this page and want your name corrected or removed? Request it here — no justification needed. For copyright claims or factual errors, use the same form.
