BORDER / GRÄNS

Customs officer Tina is known for her extraordinary sense of smell. It’s almost as if she can sniff out the guilt on anyone hiding something. But when Vore, a suspicious-looking man, walks past her, her abilities are challenged for the first time ever. Tina can sense Vore is hiding something she can’t identify. Even worse, she feels a strange attraction to him. As Tina develops a special bond with Vore and discovers his true identity, she also realizes the truth about herself. Tina, like Vore, does not belong to this world. Her entire existence has been one big lie and now she has to choose: keep living the lie or embrace Vore’s terrifying revelations.

„What I liked about the John Ajvide Lindqvist short story is that it’s not really written like, “Her sense of smell was…” or “She did this and she did that…” It’s written in diary form. You’re inside her head. She’s a little bit sad and melancholy because nobody likes her, and she has this boyfriend that she’s not really happy about, and then this guy comes and she’s like, oh, I’m falling in love, what’s going on with me? But there are very few mentions of, oh, I have this power, oh, I’m so different, or this and that. And that was the approach we took in making the movie. It’s not about a woman who has an extraordinary nose, it’s about a woman who’s lonely and looking for love, and she happens to have an extraordinary nose.“
Ali Abbasi for FilmComment