I Would Like to See It: Border

It’s so much worse to see a promising movie take a hard right into predictable mediocrity than it is to see one fail ambitiously. Border, Ali Abbasi’s 2018 fantasy film about Neanderthal-like trolls living unknown to themselves and one another in modern-day Sweden, pushes boldly into material about ugliness, desire, queerness, and conformity in ways other movies typically shy away from, but its second half relies on a gloomily staid plot twist which boils all its complex subject matter down to the most laughably polarized dissection of assimilationism versus revenge imaginable. Even the powerful closing image of Tina (Eva Melander in heavy prosthetics) holding her baby and knowing, through her own painful process of self-discovery, how to care for it can’t save the film from the flattening effect of its own lazy moralizing.

“Members of an oppressed and unwanted class are not morally superior to people in the mainstream simply because they’re oppressed” is a worthwhile line of thought, one a subtler movie might have explored at length. In Border, the issue of pedophilia is both far too grim and extreme to permit any ambiguity of sympathies and too closely joined to pernicious and persistent slander about queer and trans people preying on cis children. In light of the film so clearly evoking transness (through the prosthetic and CGI-altered cis bodies, specifically the genitals, of its protagonists), its focus on child predation feels ugly and cruel, robbing its final act of the depth which made its first two so rich. The looks of contempt from “normal” people, Tina’s painful home life with her indifferent and unfaithful partner Roland (Jörgen Thorsson), the shots of her tranquil existence alone in nature and her fearful, shrinking presence in the industrialized world — all of this vanishes the moment the movie dives into who’s a good troll and who’s a bad one, who deserves to exist and who doesn’t.

Abbasi’s camera is thoughtful and patient, gliding down roads that cut through thick, dark Swedish wilderness, observing joy and wild abandon from a distance at once aching and intimate. In one scene Tina lays her palm against the neck of a bull moose standing at the edge of her yard, running her perpetually dirty fingers through its coarse, dark hair — not so unlike her own. There is such eerie grace in these images, a sense of an old world breathing in the midst of the new. When Tina and Vore (Eero Milonoff) finally act on their attraction to one another the moment is freighted with a deep and terrible tenderness, so much unsaid, and when Tina discovers the fate of her parents and goes to sit among the nameless graves of her people the sense of loss is almost unbearable, but none of this painful beauty is enough to overcome the deeply reactionary fear at the film’s heart.