Tina works for the Swedish customs office and uses her unusual ability to sniff out emotions, including guilt and shame, to detect contraband. She has an ugly Neanderthalic appearance and lives a fairly isolated life. She lives in a secluded house in the woods with Roland, who is a dog trainer. One day at the border, Tina manages to uncover a memory card full of child pornography. Her boss wonders how she knew to look for it, and Tina tells her about the special smelling ability. The boss asks her to help their investigation into who filmed the pornography. The next day, a strange man walks through customs, and Tina asks to inspect his bag. He has a similar facial structure to Tina. The bag is full of maggots and a device that he claims is a maggot incubator. Tina lets him pass, but he returns again soon, and volunteers to be searched. He is taken into a back room to be searched more thoroughly. Another officer does a strip search of him, but discovers that he actually has female genitalia. Tina is taken aback when she hears the person also has a large scar on his tailbone. Tina asks him who he is; he tells her his name is Vore and that he will be staying in a nearby hostel. Tina visits her father, who does not have the same appearance, in his nursing home to ask about her scar, and is told she fell on something as a small child. She is intrigued by Vore and visits the hostel, where she finds him eating maggots off a tree. He offers her one, and she eats it. She offers him to stay in her guest house. Tina brings him to the room, where he tries to kiss her. Roland is immediately suspicious of Vore. Tina uses her nose to sniff out the apartment where the pedophiles live, and inside finds a camera with footage of an infant baby being raped. The police arrest the residents, but cannot track down the person trafficking the babies. During a thunderstorm, Vore comes into Tina's house, and the two of them huddle under a table, terrified of the lightning that repeatedly strikes the house. The two of them finally kiss. On a walk after the storm, Tina confesses that she has a chromosome deformity which makes it difficult to have sex and impossible to bear children. Vore tells her that it's not a deformity, and she should ignore what humans say about her. They make love, and Tina is surprised when a penis grows out of her, which she uses to mount Vore. Afterward, Vore tells Tina that she is a troll, just like he is, and that he knows of a group of trolls who keep a low profile existence on the move in Finland. Tina is excited by her newfound identity and begins living more like a troll. She finally has the confidence to tell Roland to move out of her house. She notices that Vore has taped his fridge shut and finds within it a cardboard box with a strange baby inside. Vore tells Tina that the baby is a hiisi, an unfertilized troll embryo that will soon die. In secret, Vore plans to use the hiisi as a changeling and is waiting to replace a real human infant with the dying troll embryo. While one of the pedophile suspects is being transferred, Vore stops the van and murders the suspect. Tina chases him down to question him. Vore admits he had to murder the man before he could tell the police that Vore was, in fact, the one supplying babies to be used as rape victims in porn. He tells her that very soon the trolls will get their revenge on humans for all the trolls they tortured in the 1970s. Tina is upset by this and believes that vengeance won't solve their problems. The next day, Tina's neighbors call for an ambulance because something is wrong with their baby; she has been replaced by the changeling. Tina suspects Vore is behind this and goes to the guest house, but all of Vore's belongings are gone, and a note tells Tina to meet him on the ferry. She finds him on the deck of the ferry, and tells him that the fact that she believes in compassion doesn't mean she is a human: trolls are capable of compassion too. She signals police to close in and arrest him, but he, although already having been handcuffed, manages to jump overboard. Tina's father visits from the nursing home, and finally tells her the truth about her past. He used to work at a psychiatric hospital where trolls were tortured and experimented on, and he adopted Tina to raise her as a human. Her real parents died long ago, and he tells her where they are buried. A few months later, Tina finds a parcel on her porch. Inside is a troll baby and a postcard from Finland.
Cast
Production
John Ajvide Lindqvist wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and then Abassi hired Isabella Eklöf to add more "psychological realism" to the story. Casting for the film took 18 months. To transform into the character of Tina, Eva Melander gained a considerable amount of weight and wore prosthetics that took four hours each day to apply.
Release
Border screened at Cannes, where it won the 2018 Un Certain Regard award, Telluride, and the Toronto International Film Festival. The director Ali Abbasi holds an Iranian passport, which could have prevented him from traveling to the United States due to the travel ban, but he was granted a rare exception to attend the Telluride Festival.
Reception
Box office
Border grossed $771,930 in the United States and Canada, and $1.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $2.2 million, plus $110,829 with home video sales.
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 97%, based on 120 reviews, and an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Thrilling, unpredictable, and brilliantly acted, Border offers a singular treat to genre fans looking for something different." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 75 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Alissa Simon of Variety described the film as "an exciting, intelligent mix of romance, Nordic noir, social realism, and supernatural horror that defies and subverts genre conventions," and Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "A couple of sharp curveball additions to Lindqvist’s original plot also elevate Border beyond genre trappings and into stranger, sadder, more generally relatable territory."
