Border

2018 Sweden 1hr 51 mins Cert: 15

Director: Ali Abbasi

Tina is a customs officer, with a “superpower” – the ability to smell contraband. Her nostrils twitch and her lips pull back from her teeth in a snarl when someone has got something they shouldn’t have – and she is always right. Tina lives in a remote woodland shack with a boorish slob, who only cares about his dogs.

One day, Tina is astonished and excited to come across Vore, an insolently confident young man sauntering past her, unruffled by her inspection of his bags containing weird insect-breeding equipment. Vore looks very much like her, a rebel and an outsider, qualities he embraces and revels in, while Tina is ashamed of who she is. They wander with abandon in the woods, apart from society. “They are the very different babes in the very different wood.”

It is a police procedural and a romance, a film about transgression and taboo, crossing borders and infringing limits – sensual, celebratory and strange.