![]() Sharrock’s greatest feat here is using all these absurdist touches towards achieving a sensitive, reflective sort of humor-think of something in the vein of “ The Band’s Visit,” but directed by Yorgos Lanthimos-without making Omar and his mates the butt of the joke. In unison, these elements serve as constant reminders of emptiness that advance the severity of Omar’s emotional estrangement. In that regard, Andy Drummond’s attentive production design and Nick Cooke’s shrewd cinematography accentuate the barrenness of Omar’s surroundings, like the barely furnished temporary apartment he shares with his Freddy Mercury fan roommate Farhad (a gentle and amiable Vikash Bhai), the hardly stocked grocery shop he patronizes, the bleak landscape that envelops it all. Through various sweetly observant scenes, Sharrock constructs a complex portrayal of Omar that both rises him above his austere circumstance, and blends him into it with distinctive care. And on another, mutual worries about the future of their family take over the long-distance chat. On one day, we hear him get the recipe of his favorite native dish featuring spices like sumac, near-impossible to obtain on the island. Throughout “Limbo,” Sharrock disperses Omar’s moving conversations with his mom like cadences of a musical arrangement. With his family scattered to different locations-his parents are in Istanbul and his brother, still back in Syria to be a part of the resistance-Omar often gazes into empty space with a tint of nostalgia and hangs out with his similarly placeless companions, when he doesn’t visit the town’s sole phone booth to call his family. ![]() Despite being unable to play it due to a combination of fear and a mysterious hand injury, the young man carries his grandfather’s oud around dutifully like an extension of his body. A gifted musician back in Syria virtuosic with the strings of an oud, Omar spends his days in an in-between state just like the rest of the refugees stationed at the weird, cut-off seaside outpost. In the lead is Omar, played by a terrific, misty-tempered Amir El-Masry who wears the kind of melancholy Sharrock is after on his sleeve like a second skin. "Limbo" creates an earned sense of hazy sadness, specific to its desolate locale and the persons that inhabit it. Through a refreshing narrative angle that maintains its tight and modest focus on alienation, a thematic resolve supported by thoughtful visual compositions that prioritize negative space and isolation, Sharrock unearths the many absurdities of misplacement with great perceptiveness. It just engages with its characters’ pain differently than you might expect. It’s not that “Limbo” ignores despair altogether or dismisses the spiritual hurt that its displaced human beings, stuck on a remote Scottish island while awaiting resolution on their asylum cases, experience day in and day out. Indeed, within the world of movies that unfold around the international refugee crisis-a long catalog of features and non-fiction films of late that liberally and perhaps unavoidably lean into physical and psychological suffering-Sharrock’s tale feels almost like a small miracle with its defiant stance against exploitative hopelessness. But with his sophomore feature “ Limbo,” a humanistic, tenderly deadpan plunge into the psyche of a Syrian refugee, Scottish writer/director Ben Sharrock sidesteps potential hazards like a patronizing tone and cultural insensitivity with deft, delivering something insightful, genuine, and universally relatable. Trying for comedy inside the margins of the migrant crisis is playing with fire.
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