Border, review: an outlandish tale about troll sex and the nature of monsters
Dir: Ali Abbasi. Cast: Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Jörgen Thorsson, Ann Petrén. 15 cert, 110 mins
Border is easily the weirdest film to receive an Oscar nomination this year, if we’re excluding the specific bizarreness of Bohemian Rhapsody in every technical category in which it featured. Despite missing out for Best Foreign Film, Ali Abbasi’s disturbing fairy tale curio got in for make-up, which makes sense, as it’s certainly the first thing you notice. The main character, played beneath a lank wig and doughy prosthetics by Eva Melander, is not your average Swedish customs officer.
Her name is Tina, and she has a humanoid appearance somewhat close to a Neanderthal, with hairy feet and a scar (from a childhood operation) at the base of her spine. It might sound impolite to refer to her as a troll, but given their prevalence in Scandinavian folklore, that’s as good a guess as any about what sets her apart from the rest of us.
She’s equipped, too, with a preternatural sense of smell, able to sniff out shame or guilt from anyone passing through her ferry dock’s security – a businessman, for instance, with an SD card full of child pornography, which Tina’s able to figure out just from his body odour. It’s as if the troll under the bridge had been put to work in uniform, stoically absorbing taunts as she went about her daily business.
Border is based on a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who previously wrote the vampire fable Let the Right One In (and its screen adaptation), with which this shares an uncomfortable empathy for creatures of the night. Tina has a human partner, or at least housemate, called Roland (Jörgen Thorsson), but they sleep apart and barely communicate.
She’s not the only one of her kind: while on shift, she meets a seemingly male counterpart called Vore (Eero Milonoff), who’s revealed after a strip-search to have no visible bits where you’d expect, and carries a maggot incubator with him off the ferry. Undeterred by this unsexy accessory, Tina arranges trysts with him, frolicking naked and with ecstatic release in a lake near her home. Both seem entirely unfamiliar with how their bodies are meant to function in union – they’re as surprised as we are, in fact, by the ins and outs of troll sex.
The plotting in Border, expanded by Abbasi from Lindqvist’s source, is its least successful aspect, and some mid-film lags in momentum make the first syllable of its title rather more operative than you may hope.
Tina and Vore are outlaws against every kind of social norm – their complexions, their physiognomy, their sex roles and even their birthing ones – and their grievance (especially Vore’s) against human society stems from the knee-jerk revulsion that has always caused them to be shunned.
A subplot about the child pornography ring established at the start, which isn’t very convincing in its details, enables the trolls to vent their fury on some blatantly easy targets. It also, however, provides an explanation for Tina’s heritage, and creates (in X-Men-ish fashion) a divide between her outlook towards humanity and Vore’s. How she fails to sniff out his vituperative master plan, as an expert in the taint of wrongdoing, is tricky to fathom.
The allegory is ultimately troubling, in that everything different about Tina and Vore, which the film wants to open its eyes and champion, marks them out pointedly as not human, alien, other – much as Tina wants to cling on to human moral values where Vore rejects them. Border can’t have it both ways.
It humanises at the same time that it monster-ises; it draws parallels with real-world interest groups while determinedly excluding these two from being born of our species.
Despite a wobbly handle on all this, it’s an intriguing film to wrestle with, it’s powerfully acted by Melander and Milonoff, and it sticks out for its undeniable outlandishness. After all, when was the last time a bearded troll baby posted from Finland was the closest thing to salvation?
