The place of the monster | Culture
The intelligent, conscientious and disturbing reading of the vampiric myth that proposed a film like Let me in (2008) by Thomas Alfredson led a considerable number of viewers, with a healthy curiosity about the sources, to discover the literary work of the Swedish John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of persevering production that is still very little translated into our language. Follow, for example, unpublished the book of stories - originally titled Pappersväggar, but extended in its first English translation under the title of Let the Old Dreams Die- from which the story that serves as the basis for the surprising and radical Border, second film by filmmaker Ali Abbasi, who had explored in his previous Shelley (2016) the possibilities of the hirings of rent for a terror so far from the spectral as, like that chronenbergian poetic claimed by the Julia Ducournau of Raw (2016), stuck to the vertigo of the organic.
BORDER
Address: Ali Abbasi.
Interpreters: Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Ann Petrén, Jörgen Thorsson.
Gender: fantastic. Sweden, 2018
Duration: 110 minutes
There are many ties that bind Let me in with Border: in both cases, an archetype extracted from folklore and myth-it is not necessary to reveal the nature of the figure that comes into play in Abbasi's film-is confronted with a contemporaneity dominated by emptiness, the blemish of innocence and sordidness moral. Also the two films speak of the tenderness of the monster, without falling into sentimentality: the monstrous never ceases to be ... and it is clear that it waged a fierce battle with that arbitrary normality that is responsible for designating and delimiting the territory of the anomalous without recognizing its own shadow. Border it is, thus, pure Ajvide Lindqvist, but also pure Abbasi, from the moment in which the expressive language of the film seems to somatize the breathing, the perspiration and even the overpowering animal desire of the disturbing body of its protagonist.
Vigilant of a border post with the ability to smell the guilt and shame of the traveler, Tina seems to find her reflection in the mirror when she reviews the luggage of an enigmatic traveler. Dosing each revelation with palpable wisdom, Border He knows how to always go one step ahead of the viewer's imagination. The film falls to its feet after its most risky turn and defends this improbable story with nails and teeth to turn it into a provocative speech about the ambiguous borders that separate civilization from barbarism, the human and the monstrous, claiming the final position of its heroine as the only territory of besieged integrity.
