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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