‘Border’ is a mesmerizing modern tale of horror ‘Border’
Even if you’ve read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” you can’t read it the way someone in 1897 read it.
That slow build, the mystery — What is he? What are his powers? What is his origin, and what are his purposes? — just isn’t the same after a century of horror-genre embellishments culminating in the abomination that is “Twilight.” We know a freaking vampire when we see one. Even when he’s sparkling the sunlight.
Reinventing horror so that it can deliver that same old-school Gothic dread isn’t easy, but Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist did it with his 2004 novel “Let the Right One In,” which took vampire stories into the all too human horrors of child abuse and spawned an Ali Abbasi.
Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff.
R for some sexual content, graphic nudity, a bloody violent image, and language.
At Harkins Shea. In Swedish with subtitles.
Great
Fair Bad Good Bomb
award-winning film and even a stage play.
A later Lindqvist short story is the source for “Border,” another slow-simmering and (I have to say it) very Nordic mystery that comes close to recapturing the old-school Gothic experience that started all this genre riffing in the first place.
Directed by Ali Abbasi (“Shelley”), “Border” is about a customs agent named Tina (Eva Melander) who’s used to being called an “ugly (expletive)” when she confiscates contraband. And she is ugly — the makeup crew has made sure you can’t deny it — but that’s not all she is. For one, she has an uncanny sense about which border crossers are guilty of hiding something. And, you know, more stuff, but it comes out at a “Dracula” pace, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the … um, fun?
Tina’s life of dull work and quiet communion with woodland creatures is shattered when she meets a suspected smuggler with a fascination with bugs and a face as ugly as hers. They are the same, somehow, but what does that mean?
If this were a Hollywood flick, the supremely creepy Vore (Eero Milonoff) would initiate Tina into a secret society of werewolves, and by the third act she would be embroiled in an existential war with vampires, or whatever, but we’re in Sweden, folks, and that not where this is going. Instead, “Border” reimagines folkloric fears as a reflection of the dark corners of contemporary society. Think blind bigotry, covered-up atrocities and equally atrocious revenge. Oh, and one heck of a weird sex scene.
“Border” brings to horror-fantasy the same Swedish sensibility that “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” brought to crime thrillers. Welcome to the land of eternal night.