Review: BORDER

Tina has the jutting forehead and forward mouth of an early humanoid. We see this in the film's second shot. It's not a spoiler to reveal that she later attributes this to chromosomes. She works as a border inspector, using her heightened sense of smell to pick out the kind of border crossers who are walking in fear or nervous states. Her accuracy is impeccable. One such she catches leads to her involvement in a police investigation.

One day a man with her peculiar looks passes through. He has no perceptible smell. The two regard each other with powerful and confusing emotion. His unsettling confidence returning, he tells her where to look for him and passes on. Tina tries to resume normal life sharing house in an uneasily platonic life with a young dog breeder called Roland but is too haunted and seeks the man, Vore, finding him at a local hostel. After an encounter which draws her into his normality she relaxes into relief and invites him to stay in the small bungalow at her place.

There is far too much to spoil if I described more of the plot. Vore and Tina's increasing intimacy changes everything she was confident of in her world. Having learned to keep her place at the level of a sniffer dog, enduring the audible insults of the normals who pass by her intimidating gaze at the border she learns extraordinary things about herself from Vore.

Up to this point the film deftly challenges us to feel more than we wanted to for Tina. A few scenes later we are asking ourselves questions about our own acceptance of difference to degrees we would be too automatically guarded if the story involved the more recognisable spectre of intra-human racism. It's not just Tina who's getting a few life lessons. The expertly handled blend of magical realism and Nordic grit help us here. Tina and Vore look like Neanderthals but they are considered ugly rather than impossible. It's clever but it's also unfailingly warm. So, it works.

And then it gets dark. And then it gets darker. Unrelieved by sentimentality but rather leavened by the commitment of anyone who makes it to the third act, Border is a triumph of sustained credulity, a kind of prolonged dare to call it impossible and it is issued without a moment's collapse into cuteness or the dilution of comic relief. My cinematic year has begun.