Butler's Cinema Scene

Eva  Melander

“BORDER” My rating: B+

110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

When we first set eyes on Tina, the insanely unlikely heroine of Ali Abbasi’s “Border,” we can’t even be sure of her sex.

In fact, Tina (Eva Melander) looks like nothing so much as one of our prehistoric ancestors.  She’s got the thick brows, big buck teeth and unmanageable mop of hair of a cave-dwelling Neanderthal. She’s so ugly people must force themselves not to stare.

For about half its running time, “Border” plays like a character study of a sensitive soul trapped in a grotesque body.

And then it takes off into high-blown fantasy territory.  It’s not stretching things to say the film is this year’s “The Shape of Water.”

Despite her animalistic looks, Tina is an intelligent young woman. She’s a Swedish customs agent and amazes her co-workers with her ability to smell (literally…with her nose) when travelers are trying to hide something. She can even pick up whiffs of guilt on objects handled by smugglers. Through her olfactory talents Tina is largely responsible for alerting authorities to a child pornography ring.

Her personal life is odd, too. She shares a cabin in the woods with Roland (Jorgan Thomsson), a long-haired doofus trying to breed pit bulls (the dogs hate Tina). Apparently their cohabitation is a chaste one; Tina repels Roland’s advances, but she does pay his way. He’s not much of a boyfriend, but at least Tina has someone.

She also has a father (Sten Ljunggren) slipping into dementia in a retirement home. Tina dotes on the old man.

Tina is given to long walks in the primordial forest where deer and foxes allow her to approach; she has a fascination with insects, though she can’t exactly say why.

Eero Milonoff, Eva Melander

But Tina’s world turns upside down when she crosses paths with Vore (Eero Milonoff), who is just as misshapen as she is.  She stops the suspiciously behaving traveler getting off a ferry and has a male coworker conduct a strip search.  Her stunned fellow customs agent reports that Vore appears to have female sexual organs. (Not to mention a proclivity for snacking on live bugs.)

And here’s where “Border” goes completely freakin’ into “Twilight Zone” territory.  The torrid affair that develops between Tina and Vore is bizarre enough, what with the two swimming naked in forest streams (she has alarmingly hairy breasts) and making howling love like a couple of werewolves beneath a full moon.

But when Vore reveals to Tina their common ancestry, the movie dives headfirst into a netherworld of Scandinavian legend and folk tales.

It’s one of the trickiest narrative sleight-of-hands in movie history (it’s practically in “Sixth Sense” territory), but by treating the fantastic so realistically, director Abbasi completely suckers us in.

It wouldn’t work without a monumental performance by Melander, who gained 40 pounds and each day underwent four hours of prosthetic makeup applications to transform herself into the animalistic Tina.  Check out her IMDB page…it’s virtually impossible to reconcile the attractive woman in her photo with the creature we encounter on screen.

(By the way, for the film’s first hour I assumed that director Abbasi actually had cast a misshapen individual.  The makeup and performance are that convincing.)

True cinematic originality is just about impossible to find nowadays, but with “Border” Ali Abbasi delivers something we’ve never seen before…as well as a sort of real-world fairy tale that’s impossible to forget.

| Robert W. Butler