Rating: C+
Dir: Ali Abbasi
Star: Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Jörgen Thorsson, Ann Petrén
a.k.a. Gräns
This is certainly a strange movie, and I’m not sure what to think of it. I can certainly see why it was nominated for a make-up/hair Oscar. It’s a rare honour for a foreign language film, though it ended up losing to Vice. But I found this a little too… Scandinavian, for want of a better word. It’s based on a short story by the writer of Let the Right One In, and the director would go on to make Holy Spider. You can see elements of both. As with the former, it’s fantasy, albeit grounded firmly in the real world. Like the latter, it delves into some very dark parts of human behaviour.
The central character is Tina (Melander), a weird-looking individual – think a second cousin to the Geico cavemen – who works as a Customs inspector. She’s really good at the job, because she can “smell” guilt on people, and detect contraband, from bottles of liquor to a memory card of child pornography. But her life is lonely. She lives out in the woods with Roland (Thorsson), a dog trainer, though isn’t happy about it. Then one day, she meets Vore (Milonoff) as he comes through her checkpoint. He looks uncannily like her, and she feels an instant connection. Perhaps the story she was told by her father, about Tina suffering from a genetic abnormality which left her unable to have children, wasn’t the whole truth.
Meanwhile, Tina is also getting involved in the investigation following her discovery of the memory card. It brings her into contact with the worst of humanity, and Vore encourages the resulting cynicism. According to his way of thinking, “Humans are parasites that use everything on earth for their own amusement.” However, Tina is going to discover, just because someone is like you, does not necessarily mean they are like you. In other words: she’ll be changing her Facebook status to, “It’s complicated.” Because despite their common heritage, they have radically different world views, with Vore being consumed by a desire for revenge on mankind, due to the cruel way it has treated him in the past. Or her. Or they. Whatever fucking pronoun. It’s also complicated.
It’s the kind of film I feel I could appreciate considerably more than I could like or enjoy. For me, it seems to be bending over backwards to be even-handed, not making or wanting the audience to make moralistic judgments about anyone. Considering some of the shit that goes down, I would say moralistic judgments are entirely deserved. It may also be too damn weird for its own good, with some elements – and we’re back to those pronouns again – which appear inserted more for shock value than out of narrative necessity. Could have used an awkward David Attenborough voice-over, perhaps. There’s scope for expansion here, perhaps a TV series following Tina’s detective adventures. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d watch it…