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 Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
Can’t-Miss Film Events (Fall Arts Preview 2023) Chicago's film festival institutions are hardly autumnal: The Chicago International Film Festival turns fifty-nine; Chicago Underground is thirty this year; and Reeling? Forty-one. Tuck into 130 years of tasty institutional memory this fall.
Seeing The Elephant: A Review Of Babylon The boisterous, brawling yet melancholy "Babylon," is a variation on film history, but more drawing for drama. It's gaudy and mean, celebratory and sorrowful.
Heart: A Review of Soul The real world is soulful, too, in Pixar's bountiful life of the mind.
