Border

Tina is a customs officer at a Swedish ferry terminal. Her face is unusual, nobody dares look at her, and she has always been told she has a chromosome defect. She has one gift: she can smell fear, shame and guilt, so no smuggler gets past her. Then a passenger comes through who looks like her. Meeting Vore changes everything about who Tina is. Ali Abbasi directed. He wrote it with John Ajvide Lindqvist and Isabella Eklöf, from Lindqvist's short story. Eva Melander plays Tina and Eero Milonoff plays Vore. The heaviest work was the prosthetic makeup, with more than twenty artists on it. Tina's face is built from nine separate prosthetic pieces, forehead, eyelids, ears and chin, plus a wig and asymmetrical yellowed dentures. Application took two hours and forty-five minutes with a makeup artist working on each half of the face. The designer Göran Lundström was determined not to fall into fantasy makeup; he wanted creatures that looked odd and were still believable as things that could exist. Melander also gained weight for the part. It won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and was Sweden's submission for the foreign language Academy Award. Who it is for: viewers who like films that sit between genres and resist classification. Who it is not for: anyone going in unprepared for difficult body material. The film turns somewhere unexpected and harsh in its middle.