Border [Gräns] **** (2018, Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Viktor Åkerblom) – Movie Review

There’s a very strange-looking woman at the Border, a customs officer who seems able to sniff out the guilty as they come through customs. She really can sniff out trouble, smelling out guilt, and shame and sin and sex, which pleases the customs people no end. It is not a gift to be sniffed at. But where does it come from?

One day a very strange-looking man comes through customs, a suspect the case she is investigating, called Vore (Eero Milonoff), and Tina the customs officer (Eva Melander) develops a weird attraction to him.

No spoilers here then, as director Ali Abbasi’s 2018 Swedish film Border [Gräns] depends on the subsequent series of increasingly bizarre revelations in the plot from a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of the novel and screenplay of Let the Right One In. Bit by bit, these fairly startling revelations have Tina questioning her nature, her values and ultimately her entire existence.

There are really only a couple of other characters, Tina’s live-in lover Roland (Jörgen Thorsson) and her old dad (Sten Ljunggren), confined to an old folks’ home, as well as the head investigator Agneta (Ann Petrén).

It’s a tall order turning this provocative short story into a successful 101-minute movie, but Abbasi has a good go at it, keeping it continuingly intriguing and surprising. It has rough edges, in some dialogue wobbles and tricky gear changes, though the gear changes are always upwards. But Melander and Milonoff are well up for it and well into it.

Dark and uncompromising to the end, it keeps the faith, and stays true to the weird and the strange. It even has something to say about the state of humanity and keeping true to yourself, whoever that turns out to be, and says it in a most peculiar and extreme way that is kind of endearing. Is it a grim fairy tale, or a horror movie, or a fantasy thriller, or a love story, or a morality tale? Perhaps it’s just a comment on the customs. You have to suck it and see. You’ll never walk through the Nothing To Declare gate without feeling guilty about something ever again.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 91st Academy Awards in 2019.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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