What does it mean to be human? Border/Gräns, a recent film by Iranian director Ali Abbassi, appears to present morality as an integral theme, a line blurred by the central character Tina (Eva Melander), a visually striking troll living and working in contemporary Sweden. She possesses a stringent moral code and a supernatural ability to smell the emotions of passers-by (guilt, shame, fear etc.) which comes of use in her work as a customs officer detecting contraband. When she is enticed by the danger and familiarity of a strange and deformed traveller, Vore (Eero Milonoff), she soon begins to question her personal sense of identity.
Explaining her allegiance with mankind to the angry and vengeful Vore, Tina asserts “I don’t see the point of evil … is it human to think that way?”. Under the heavy use of prosthetic make-up, Melander gives a terrific performance evoking pathos by externalising an internal crisis. The film juggles these different plot strands, adding some not contained within the source material, but by far the most significant and affecting is the central relationship that flourishes out of an embrace of difference and poses an ultimately tragic conundrum.
Abassi had his feature debut with Shelley, a dramatic horror film which evokes the atmospheric womb-anxieties of Rosemary’s Baby. With Border, as an Iranian filmmaker, Abassi offers an outsider’s representation of Scandinavian folk-lore. The film was adapted from a short story by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, whose novel Let the Right One In had both a Swedish and American film adaptation and sparked a popular moment of Nordic magical realism. Similarly to Let the Right One In, Borders fits well within this category, utilising allegory to present an enchantingly prescient tale of marginality and belonging.
As the title suggests the film is about division. Both in the physical sense of the border between Sweden and Finland, but also thematic boundaries between good and evil, animal and human, nature and civilisation, as well as oppositions within sexuality and identity. Abassi delights in presenting this ambivalence offering a hybridity of convention and archetypes from fantasy, Nordic thriller and Cronenberg-esque body-horror.
A hand clutching at earth and moss, the feeding of worms and maggots, squidgy troll embryos and interchanged genitalia. The film’s iconography presents graphic imagery that contains a beauty in its embrace and acceptance of the strange and the other. This is illustrated in a scene where Tina and Vore playfully chase each each other naked through a dense forest and rejoice in splashing each other as they swim in a nearby river.
Attributable to Abassi’s gentle cinematic composure, the film triumphs in creating pathos toward the central characters. This situates Borders in a peculiar position within contemporary European cinema, not comfortably placed alongside the extreme outings of Gaspar Noe or Lars Von Trier, but rather suited served alongside the fantastical and strangely beautiful films of Guillermo del Toro.
Often beautiful, sometimes disturbing, Border offers a dark mythical love story of transgression and belonging.
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