Casting a deadpan eye over island life
Limbo 12A cert, 104 min
Dir: Ben Sharrock; Starring: Amir El-masry, Vikash Bhai, Kenneth Collard, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Kwabena Ansah, Ola Orebiyi
All the minor characters in Ben Sharrock’s Limbo are native to the Outer Hebrides. This is the first feature ever to be shot on North and South Uist, and it looks like nothing else: a study in roads winding towards who knows where, through a samey terrain of flat green moorland, which feels wintry to the bone even before it’s frosted by inevitable blizzards.
The locals may know every inch of this place, but that only makes living in it more disconcerting for Omar (the quiet, watchful Amir El-masry) and his three temporary house buddies. They’re asylum seekers, residing here in a squat cottage while their applications percolate with agonising slowness through the immigration system. Unlike in your average refugee drama, the red tape is all kept offscreen, and Sharrock’s film is in fact a baleful comedy about the monotony of the waiting game.
Beware – there’s not much to do on the Uists but watch teenagers drive doughnuts and mind your own business. Omar, a semi-famous player of the oud in his Syrian motherland, can reach his family only using a phone box, to hear news of their settlement in Istanbul and report back on his own hapless, penniless status.
Limbo is virtually plotless, and that’s the point: it’s about an unvarying second act for anyone like Omar, his horizons stretching out as barren as the scrub. It takes quite some daring for Sharrock to commit to this flat continuum, denying himself all the peaks and troughs a writer-director would normally rustle up – any hint of a love interest, say. The tone has to be very sure; the characters must be worth our investment to make their stint in purgatory count for something.
Their interactions in class with a pair of clueless social workers (Kenneth Collard and Sidse Babett Knudsen) are the closest Sharrock brings us to grotesque absurdism. In “cultural awareness” lessons, the refugees are taught that a woman’s smile is not an open invitation to molest her, and given tips for finessing their way into cleaning jobs.
I was grateful when some of this comic business subsided, not because it isn’t well handled, but because the film’s true subject is Omar’s isolation, his long walk to nowhere. Fittingly, Sharrock has adopted a Keatonesque deadpan aesthetic that feels arrived at via a few different places.
The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow.
In cinemas now