Kritiken

A curious, promising piece of work that doesn’t at all make it to the finish-line of its potential.

While the film defies neat genre classification, it has elements of physical horror – like a mating between the mind of David Cronenberg and something that crawled out of a compost heap.

Border is simply brilliant and best seen clean, although a duty of care means that viewers of a delicate disposition are warned that there’s a significant amount of body horror on screen. Fans of David Cronenberg, early David Lynch and perhaps Walerian Borowyczk will be happy.

In all its freakiness, Ali Abbasi’s film Border is something between a superhero origin myth, a cop procedural and a body-horror romance. It’s about transgression and taboo, crossing borders and infringing limits: about culturally constructed wrongness and socially deplored differentness...

Border reverses the perspective taken by most other horror films. In more conventional genre fare, Tina and Vore would be portrayed as malevolent outsiders, but in the world conjured up by director Ali Abbasi, the humans are the monsters.

As with any folkloric allegory, the film is fanciful, yet at the same time it articulates recognisable issues facing anyone who has ever been marginalised, overlooked, alienated or oppressed.

Telling an age-old story in a singularly original way, Border is a compelling, sometimes excruciating fairy tale for our times — with a bizarre sex scene to rival Team America’s.

Ali Abbasi has crafted something eerie and rather wonderful with this pungent allegory of outsiderdom... It also chucks in uncomfortable questions about assimilation and the superficial judgments we make of people, as well as plenty of icky moments that bury themselves under your skin and stay there.

[W]hen Abbasi and Lindqvist's script sticks closest to the unlikely awakening story at its core, Border is both charming and moving. Even when it veers from that path, Melander's performance gives depth and warmth to a figure who would be all too easy to mock or hate.

Without Abbasi ever giving up the character-study realism and bolstered by the leads’ tangibly demonstrative and unforgettable portrayals, Tina’s remote forest home slowly transforms from the setting for a fractured fairy tale of belonging into a thorny Nordic noir on the pitfalls of identity.

I don’t know a lot about Swedish folklore, so I was in an especially cold state as I went into this movie, written by Abbasi, Isabella Eklof and John Ajvide Lindqvist (also the writer of the 2008 film “Let the Right One In”), from Lindqvist’s short story. As cold as possible is a good way to see it. This is a movie that aims to startle in overt and subtextual ways; the less known before viewing, the better.

The ambitious sweep of ideas makes allegorical nods to various timely socio-cultural issues, from the oppression of immigrants to the ostracization of racial and sexual minorities. But Border is less invested in glib symbolism or political commentary than in the specific, felt experience of being adrift between social boundaries and categories—and in the thrill of reclaiming one’s identity from those lost spaces.