Fantastic Fest Review: Border

From Frankenstein's Monster onward, genre fiction has questioned what it is to be human. Border adapted (from the novel by Let The Right One In novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist) asks that question, with an added twist of nature and nurture.

Tina (Jordskott's Eva Melander, unrecognizable under full-body prosthetics) knows she is different: Under a Cro-Magnon brow, she works as a customs officer on a Swedish coastal port. Liked by her colleagues but constantly distant from them, she has an uncanny skill of smelling out guilt and sin. She's – if not happy – at least satisfied with her position, helping other people through enforcing the law. That is, right until Vore (Eero Milonoff) turns up, the first person who she has ever seen who looks like her and acts like her – however, he has a comfort in his skin that has always evaded her. The question quickly becomes, what will she give up in order to be more like him?

Border is a Venn diagram of a film: Sometimes darkly comedic, sometimes sweet, sometimes a stomach-churning crime drama, with aspects of both Scandinavian mythology and contemporary queer cinema. It's the crime aspect that sometimes adds an unnecessary level of queasiness: Tina's hunt for a child pornography ring creeps as a needlessly provocative strand, with a surprisingly abrupt resolution that just leaves a bad taste.

If Border has a close relative, it's probably another recent Fantastic Fest example of genre agnosticism, last year's Thelma; but like that, its wide spread thematic net sometimes means a lack of clarity in what its narrative direction. In Tina, director Ali Abbasi manages to create a central character that's easy to appreciate, and often fascinating, but hard to like, and equally often deliberately off-putting. Which is also a fair description of Border.

---

Border

Texas Premiere
Tue., Sept. 25, 2pm

---

Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 20-27. For more news, reviews, and interviews, as well as our daily show with the oneofus.net podcast network, visit austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.