Featuring cold, barren landscapes that foreground displaced refugees who hopelessly await the status of their visa applications while stuck on a fictional Scottish isle, Ben Sharrock’s entracing new film Limbo is a perceptive and earnest work. Walking a fine line between deadpan humor and a heartfelt drama, Sharrock’s film shows the complex ways in which forced cultural assimilation to the West plays out on the margins of Great Britain, drawing comparisons to a recent refugee-themed film like Aki Kaurismaki The Other Side of Hope, as well as the single location absurdist works of Yorgos Lathimos, such as The Lobster.
Limbo follows four refugees who, as they wait months for visa approval (for some, years), attend mandatory cultural awareness classes (i.e. forced assimilation) while they accept or ignore forms of Western culture. There is Farhad (an entertaining but enduring Vikash Bhai) from Afghanistan, who cites Freddie Mercury as a seminal influence on his style (he says he learned English from Queen’s frontman). Abedi (a hard-headed Kwabena Ansah) from West Africa refuses to take job interview tips for blue collar positions as he dreams of playing soccer for Chelsea F.C. Meanwhile, Abedi’s brother Wasef (a pragmatic Ola Orebiyi) and Farhad keenly watch and discuss the American sitcom Friends.
Sharrock’s film mainly centers on Omar (a gently stoic but soulful Amir El-Masry), an oud player from war-torn Syria who ignores acclimating to Western lifestyles and cultural forms (despite speaking perfect English). From attempting to recreate his mother’s dishes to speaking every day with his family over the one pay phone in town to carrying his heavy oud wherever he walks, Omar’s actions stem from a weighty mix of nostalgia for his homeland and the guilt of leaving his family. Omar’s persistence to hang on to his upbringing (and consequently, Syria) is thus framed as an act of survival against the threat of cultural assimilation and the punishing psychological toll that waiting aimlessly for visa approval can have.
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Sharrock has reportedly lived in Syria and spent time in refugee camps, and the young filmmaker’s ability to parse essential and important details of a refugee’s life is astonishing. The asylum seekers are given subsistence level stipends (Omar painfully tells his mother he doesn’t have enough funds to help support the family), they’re legally unauthorized to work and forced to cope with tiny heaters and tiny rooms (Omar and Farhad each sleep on twin beds that are positioned uncomfortably close to each other). Limbo is especially moving during Omar’s phone calls to his family, which are often comprised of the camera panning or cutting to a nearby empty field, with negative space emphasizing the isolation of being stuck in a remote place, a tone felt from the constant overbearing presence of the clouds, which are featured in nearly all exterior shots.
Limbo is most poignant when the disparate refugees bond. Scenes when all four main characters view Friends or confess to each other truths they are forced to hide under the bureaucratic immigration system — or discuss how to best handle Farhad stealing and subsequently adopting a chicken (whose name becomes Freddie Jr.) from a local farmer — highlight this bond but also the eradication of class (it is implied that Omar comes from a upper middle class, more formally educated background than his housemates).
With the Friends scenes, Limbo comments on the entanglement of Western culture with the refugees’ own backgrounds. The many art forms shown and discussed — TV shows, musical groups, sports teams — serve to comment on the cultural crossings of globalization and help delude characters facing the harshest of realities. Nick Cooke’s cinematography consists of vibrant and fantastical landscapes that refer to impressionistic paintings, a strategy that suggests the barren, drab landscapes cannot be made bare without a form of rearrangement that harkens back to a previous art form.
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Despite the painterly renditions of the Scottish vistas, the final sequence highlights Sharrock’s most essential visual medium. During the finale, the letterbox aspect ratio changes to a widescreen format, an expansion of the screen that acts as a self referential ode to a signifier of cinema, suggesting that films, along with cultural forms like sports, music or paintings, help us cope through times of aimlessness or “limbo.” For Sharrock and the refugees on the isle, a state of limbo can be defined as liminal hopelessness but also a dream scape occupied by one’s most precious cultural artifacts and forms, a thrilling conjunction gracefully explored in Limbo.
Mo Muzammal is a freelance film critic based in Southern California. His interests include Pakistani Cinema, Parallel Cinema and film theory.
Categories: 2020s, 2021 Film Reviews, Drama, Featured