Sweden’s entry for best foreign-language picture, the sentimental yet delightfully savage, sneakily supernatural “Border” (Gräns), is a bushel and peck of quirk and oddity, richly designed and with an elegantly structured screenplay by Isabella Eklöf and John Ajvide Lindqvist (“Let the Right One In”). Customs officer Tina (Eva Melander) possesses an uncanny sense of smell, known for homing in on the guilty. An odd-looking man named Vore (Eero Milonoff) enters her life, who slowly, steadily and with certainty, confuses her, her sense of scent, her sense of herself. Strange meets strange. Ali Abbasi’s direction embraces the characters, and thus, the stories that bloom around them like so much madness come to dark life. Where do Tina and Vore belong? Can they belong? The sense of being an outsider, of essential outsiderness, resonates in every scene. “Border” is a welcome melancholic romance to stand right beside Lindqvist’s unmatched novel and script for “Let The Right One In.” 110m. (Ray Pride)
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
Fall Arts Preview 2020: Manual Cinema's Candyman Dream While Manual Cinema—the Chicago-based performance collective, design studio and film and video production company can’t squeak a peep about their work until the Universal release sees daylight, the work, weirdly, wordless, worries up a world all its own.
