Lim­bo – first-look review

Cin­e­ma appears to have tak­en on a cer­tain man­tle when it comes to edu­cat­ing audi­ences about the dehu­man­is­ing aspects that come from seek­ing asy­lum in a coun­try that is not your own. A malev­o­lent polit­i­cal wave, dead set on paint­ing any/​all incom­ing traf­fic as a blight on an already over­bur­dened sys­tem, has man­aged to con­vince many that asy­lum seek­ers come to coun­tries such as the UK on a car­pet of rose petals and, upon arrival, are hand­ed a wedge of ban­knotes to help them on their way. Ben Sharrock’s debut fea­ture film Lim­bo makes the con­vinc­ing case that this is sim­ply not true.

And at the same time, the film takes place in a world that is a few incre­ments dis­placed from grit­ty real­i­ty. Its sto­ry unfurls on a far-flung Scot­tish island where the local pop­u­la­tion is scarce and local ameni­ties are vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent. Health­care in the area con­sists of a mobile hut and a timetable stat­ing when some kind of med­ical pro­fes­sion­al might be head­ing along to assist. It is, as the title sug­gests, a spar­tan land­scape as an out­stretched, exis­ten­tial wait­ing room, with those who have been post­ed there forced to sit tight and wait for an inde­ter­mi­nate amount of time for their appli­ca­tions to be processed. Every­thing, includ­ing the whim­si­cal locals, smacks of Father Ted’s own Crag­gy Island.

The cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist is Omar (Amir El-Mas­ry), a up-and-com­ing Oud mae­stro (which is a lit­tle like a lute) who has fled from Syr­ia in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion to his par­ents, who have end­ed up in Istan­bul, and his broth­er, who has decid­ed to stay home and fight for the cause. His com­mu­ni­ca­tions with his par­ents, which allow him to wax nos­tal­gic about hap­pi­er times, take place in a decrepit phone box sit­u­at­ed on the side of a dirt track in the mid­dle of nowhere, and Shar­rock has fun watch­ing his fel­low asy­lum seek­ers queue as they stand like stat­ues as their dis­pos­able pon­chos bil­low in the wind.

Shar­rock sets out his absurd com­ic tone in the film’s open­ing scene in which two grotesque social work­ers enact a short the­atri­cal scene intend­ed to demon­strate tra­di­tion­al British eti­quette. Hel­ga (Sidse Babett Knud­sen) gyrates to some music while her accom­plice Boris (Ken­neth Col­lard) slith­ers around her inap­pro­pri­ate­ly. A sud­den (and hilar­i­ous) reverse shot reveals a tight­ly packed room of male asy­lum seek­ers, and it chan­nels the film’s cen­tral theme of an infan­til­is­ing effect that comes nat­u­ral­ly from a bureau­crat­ic tier, and a polite but insid­i­ous fear of for­eign cul­tures some­how sul­ly­ing our own, far-from-pass­able social character.

When the film push­es the droll humour of the sit­u­a­tion, it actu­al­ly serves to empha­sise the inter­nalised pain suf­fered by the var­i­ous char­ac­ters we fol­low. A heat­ed debate between two African migrants pre­tend­ing to be broth­ers, about a key dra­mat­ic plot point in the sit­com Friends, swift­ly tra­vers­es the chasm of the com­ic to the trag­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly when you realise that this is time being wast­ed on not fol­low­ing tan­gi­ble dreams and aspi­ra­tions that come from being in a place where your life and liveli­hood are not in con­stant jeopardy.

Sharrock’s dead­pan direc­tion and his use of com­po­si­tion and light­ing play­ful­ly filch­es from some of the greats such as Jacques Tati and, more recent­ly, Aki Kau­ris­mä­ki, but his shots are exe­cut­ed with a pre­ci­sion which sug­gests this is no mere homage. There is a lapse into sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty in its final stretch, where the per­pet­u­al­ly adrift and con­fused Omar decides to get a grip on things, and the Oud, which he sym­bol­i­cal­ly car­ries with him every­where but refus­es to play, even­tu­al­ly and pre­dictably becomes a stand in for his con­flict­ed feel­ings of nation­al pride.