Border's reviews
Media reviews
The A.V. Club
Just when you think you?ve seen it all, along comes Border. A thematically rich and deeply strange blend of romantic drama, magical-realist fantasy, and crime thriller, Sweden?s official entry to this year?s Academy Awards splits the difference between the highbrow cringe comedy of Toni Erdmann and the lowbrow cop fantasy 'Bright'.
The Playlist
Unique, unforgettable and cathartic, Border is an oddball, but poignant cult classic in the making. Abbasi?s sincerity wisely avoids caricature and mocking his marginalized characters and in doing so he crafts a surprisingly humanist and artful story of love for the diminished and dismissed outsiders of the world.
Indiewire
Abbasi grounds the narrative in an emotional foundation even as it flies off the rails.
Los Angeles Times
Selected by Sweden as its entry for the foreign language Oscar, the refreshingly offbeat, sturdily handled ?Border? is not just unlikely to resemble any of its subtitled competition but also anything else you?ll see this year.
New York Times
This is a movie that aims to startle in overt and subtextual ways; the less known before viewing, the better.
The Wrap
Border? is dark and unsettling and proudly deranged; it?s the kind of shocker that may not survive too well outside the festival environment, but seems to be a necessary part of every Cannes.
The Hollywood Reporter
As a timely yarn about the mistreatment of minorities, both in Sweden and worldwide, Border is rich in allegorical layers. But as a thriller at least partially rooted in supernatural genre conventions, its relentlessly dour Nordic glumness drags a little. Social realism and magical realism make uneasy bedfellows.
Roger Ebert
even the most open-minded viewers may have difficulty relating to the two lead protagonists in "Border," a cynical Swedish romantic-fantasy that follows estranged border patrolwoman Tina (Eva Melander) and her unconvincing attraction to Byronic stranger Vore (Eero Milonoff).