Border (2018)

The border guard Tina can smell guilt, shame, and contraband, which makes her useful to the Swedish customs service and unbearable at dinner. Ali Abbasi's film, adapted from a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, opens as a procedural and then takes a hard left into stranger territory: a love story between two trolls in the Scandinavian woods. It won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and picked up an Oscar nomination for makeup, which indicates where the industry's affections settled. Prosthetics and weight gain, not casting, carry the burden of Tina's Neanderthal face, and the film is content to let that stand without comment.

Tina's romance with Vore is where the film's more adventurous instincts surface. He arrives with maggots in his luggage and female genitalia beneath his clothes. She discovers an erect penis she did not know she possessed. The film treats this biology as fantasy, mining it for wonder and discomfort instead of argument, so the queerness stays folded inside the creature design. Tina is a capable woman who evicts a controlling boyfriend and claims her own identity, though the film never builds a case against patriarchy. Her body is odd, and the film simply accepts it, declining to convert that acceptance into a lesson about anyone's real waistline.

Beneath all of it sits an allegory about a hidden minority, a people tortured in psychiatric hospitals during the 1970s and now plotting a patient revenge. The parallel to ethnic persecution is present but never named, and no real history is rewritten to make the point. Vore's scheme raises questions about compassion and vengeance, and the film lets character carry them instead of a monologue. There is no climate sermon. There is no indictment of capital. The whole affair unfolds in a moral universe that predates our current vocabulary. Refreshing, if you can stomach the maggots.