The best way to experience Border is by not knowing anything about Border. Let me explain…

Iranian-Swedish director Ali Abbasi takes the seemingly-innocent genre of romantic fairytales and with a conjuring of dark material so weird it’ll make your head spin, he creates one of the most disturbing films of the year. It’s essentially a troll love story set in the Swedish countryside, but Border‘s hyper-realistic aesthetic combined with a jaw-dropping, phenomenal performance from Eva Melander makes this film a sight to be seen.

Tina (Melander) lives a rather solitary life. She works as a border patrol agent and, due to her unnatural dog-like instinct to detect shame, guilt, and rage through her sense of smell, she is highly successful at catching smugglers with secrets. It should also be mentioned that, along with these unique capabilities, Tina’s appearance is noticeably different from her peers. Due to a chromosome deformity, her features are extremely masculine with a protruding forehead and unruly body hair. She is the definition of a societal outcast but continues to live her life, for the most part unaffected, but surrounded by her manipulative roommate Roland (Jörgen Thorsson) and her ailing father (Sten Ljunggren).

Border’s ability to teeter between fantasy vs reality is cinema magic at its best.

Tina’s daily routine is interrupted when she meets and quickly develops an unexplainable connection to a mysterious man whose smell she cannot figure out. A husky man with features similar to her own, including crooked and underdeveloped teeth, Vore (Eero Milonoff) is an enigma. After an agonizing and emotional back and forth on Tina’s end, she finally allows herself to get to know the man who she feels magnetically drawn towards. While getting to know him, Tina begins to discover who she really is and starts to realize that what she is discovering will change her life forever.

There is so much to unpack in Border, both in front of and behind the camera. Most notably is Eva Melander’s total transformation into this troll-like creature, Tina. Though her character has a heart of gold and a humanistic desire to help others in need, it is overpowered by her awkwardness. One can’t help but focus on her exterior with a judgemental distraction. Melander’s performance doesn’t rely on the phenomenal appearance-changing prosthetics she wore- she taps into the heart of the character and is no holds barred when it comes to the vulnerability of raw emotion. She leaves nothing to be desired, making her performance nothing short of Oscar-worthy.

Audible nuances gnaw at you like incessant gnats in the summer- the sounds of open-mouthed chewing, heavy panting, and buzzy mosquitoes contribute to the film’s intentional discomfort. The aesthetic of the locations used, combined with these seemingly minor additional details are what makes the world of Border so eerily realistic. It’s easy to forget that beyond the lush, dense forests and murky waters, or beneath the layers of scratchy wool sweaters and out of control body hair, there is an entire film crew behind the scenes and a director calling “action.”

Border won the Un Certain Regard Award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and continued to shock and awe audiences during its festival run. As Sweden’s official Oscar entry in the Best Foreign Language category, Border’s ability to teeter between fantasy vs reality is cinema magic at its best.

‘Border’ is rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity, a bloody violent image, and language. 110 minutes. Opening this Friday at ArcLight Hollywood.