However, there’s a happier world just beyond Omar’s experiences, and “Limbo” excels whenever people reach out to its sad-eyed protagonist to invite him in. And his older brother, who chose to remain in Syria and join resistance fighters there, serves as a constant source of guilt. (“A musician who doesn’t play his instrument is dead,” he recalls being told.) His only connection to his family comes from the island’s solitary phone booth, where he calls his judgmental parents, and their voices come to him like echoes of a distant path.
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He still carries around his grandfather’s oud (a Middle-Eastern instrument that resembles a guitar) but can’t seem to recall how to play it. But the filmmaker’s deadpan style is soon undercut by the more muted, melancholic look at Omar’s routine: In between shrugging off the friendly overtures of his new roommate Farhad (Vikash Bhai) and gazing out at the unforgiving sea, Omar has morphed into a sad shell of his old self. Its hilarious opening number finds a pair of zany locals educating the refugees about appropriate behavior on the dance floor, and Sharrock returns to that training room several more times. Still, it takes some time to sort through what kind of movie “Limbo” wants to be. A movie born of our times but destined to outlive them, it deserves to cross the threshold from festival darling to audience favorite.‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ Review: These Heroes in a Half Shell Get a Fully Satisfying New Feature An underlying bittersweet sentiment prevails up to the movie’s appropriately muted climax, which dispenses with an idealized future or a neatly wrapped entrance into the promised land for Omar.Īn offbeat and life-affirming triumph, “ Limbo” is the kind of original work of art that moves the needle on an issue by delving into the human factor rather than hanging out on the impersonal surface. Sharrock writes intricately, filing the crevices of his premise with intimate details, anecdotes, and instances of poetic yearning, all of which configure the essence of these characters adrift in the ocean of the West’s indifference. Scenes during a cultural awareness course to encourage assimilation reveal more about the reluctant hosts’ xenophobic preconceptions than the new arrivals’ perceived foreignness.
The gags instead target the locals, most well-intentioned but ignorant. Humor in “Limbo” springs from a phenomenal screenplay that peddles neither condescending compassion nor misery exploitation. Frames crowded with the four men expectantly waiting for the mail differ sharply from those containing sparse winter vistas. Within the boxy aspect ratio, cinematographer Nick Cooke’s exact compositions illustrate the story’s marked contrasts between a sense of community, found in shared hardship, and the soul-crushing isolation of individual experience. Only then can he enjoy small doses of comfort, like that in a familiar spice. Understandably dejected, El-Masry’s Omar traverses guilt and self-doubt to regain appreciation for his skill, a valuable method to preserve his people’s culture. The director maximizes the inherently surreal elements of this purgatory at the intersection of safety in Europe and the looming threat of deportation.Ī marvelously guarded El-Masry, an Egyptian-born actor seen in “ The Rise of Skywalker,” maintains a reserved, almost emotionless composure that only breaks when Bhai’s matter-of-fact earnestness makes him smile.
Like its bureaucratically embattled and often invisible heroes, the narrative occupies a liminal space somewhere between the downbeat reality of displacement, racism and Islamophobia, and mournful dreamlike sequences. That he channels empathic concern for those fleeing war and economic deprivation, as well as heartfelt drama and subdued lyricism into a singular film amounts to a stroke of storytelling genius.
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