There is something deliriously off-kilter about Limbo, Ben Sharrock’s absurdist comedy about a group of asylum seekers awaiting processing on a remote Scottish island. Nothing is ever quite right. In its strange, purgatorial world, the vast expanses of the Outer Hebrides stretch interminably, horizon lines of fogged grey and green punctuated only by a bright blue-clad figure clutching an impossibly bulky instrument. A woman with the head of a dolphin offers our protagonist, achingly sweet Syrian refugee Omar, a leaflet on wildlife tours from the frozen harbour. The supermarket shelves are near empty. The doctor is never in. In a cultural-assimilation class, the asylum seekers are asked to form sentences using the past tense. “I used to cry myself to sleep every night,” a refugee says carefully, “but now, I don’t have any tears left.” The teacher applauds.

It is as if the Freudian uncanny has been made startlingly funny, and almost unbearably sad. The world is peculiar, defamiliarised and desensitised – or rather, populated by new, unknown senses: weather-lashed beaches filled with the screeching sound of a family car doing doughnuts; shelves of English mustard but no spices; the constant giggles of ’90s contentment sitcom Friends playing in a room full of four strangers and little furniture. Everything is out of place: habits, conversations, ambitions. Omar, gentle and haunted and a gifted musician, has not played his oud since leaving Syria. This is not, Limbo tells us, the paradise we imagined, the sanctuary we were – or had – promised.

Limbo

Courtesy of: MUBI

Sharrock has always been a markedly formalist filmmaker, and Limbo feels lyrical in the way his films – and those of his much admired influence, Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman – are, like concrete poetry brought to life. The camera in Limbo is oddly static, embodying the same lethargy as the characters it captures. Jump cuts are few; people instead move in and out of frame, as if the camera is too reluctant or simply too tired to move. When it does, it sweeps slowly across with a planimetric fixity, the landscape appearing to slide against the camera’s lens. One such shot slips past Omar in the island’s only phone box to take in the other asylum seekers, rooted against the barren hills like ancient standing stones. The world in Limbo is rigid, unyielding and unremorseful, and our own gazes are just as so. And, in between the two, the asylum seekers are trapped, waiting and waiting.

And wait they do. Sharrock isn’t afraid to stretch time out. Shots linger in frame: Omar’s drolly expressionless face gazes back at obliviously rude locals; the same conversations repeat over the same endless swathes of roads and hills receding into the distance. Tasks are comprehensively and entirely documented, as a postman drives in ridiculous short bursts between neighbouring houses to deliver letters to everyone except the quietly watchful and hopeful asylum seekers. Anchored by Omar – a devastatingly sensitive performance by Amir El Masry – the bureaucratic purgatory of the asylum process is cast in a necessary emotional light, as these soft, lonely, angry men drift in and out of room and landscape and frame, the tight aspect ratio closing them in. There is little beyond it, but what it contains is nowhere near enough. Deprived of a certain future, wrenched from their past, Omar and his friends are tethered to the present, to its ever stretching isolation.

Limbo

Courtesy of: MUBI

Limbo takes as its subject the pan-European response to the global refugee crisis, but there is nevertheless a specificity to each asylum seeker’s identity that speaks to a particular crisis, a particular condition of dislocation. “In Arabic, we have a saying. It’s bukra fil mish-mish,” says Omar. “It means, ‘tomorrow, there will be apricots’… But I never got the saying, because we always had apricots.” For Omar, the devastation in Syria – and the devastation of his past life – haunts his interminable present, as old videos of family crackle on his phone screen and memories of his family, their bountiful apricot tree, his brother still fighting in the country, bleed through. Sharrock recognises that even within totalising structures, it is the specifics that matter: the specifics of home and memory and loss that fly in the face of generic conceptualisations (“I used to have a beautiful house before it was blown up by coalition forces,” the teacher suggests in the same grammar lesson, as the class of asylum seekers stare stonily back). 

Limbo

Courtesy of: MUBI

A remarkable feat of absurdism and filmmaking craft, what renders Sharrock’s sophomore film truly exceptional is this molten empathetic core. For all its investigation into liminality and ambivalence, Limbo’s own position on the treatment of refugees is never once equivocal, their subjective position never once decentred. There is a dry sadness to the proceedings that is both tender (towards the depth of pain its characters face) and angry (towards the systems that caused it). Ultimately, what unfolds on screen is impossible to separate from the UK’s real-life border policies – refugees drowned in the Channel, rights to citizenship revoked, compassion and care always withheld. Sharrock has even spoken of the unsettling way that new proposals to hold refugees on Ascension Island mimic his intendedly surreal premise. 

As Omar and his fellow asylum seekers navigate their new, in-between life, Limbo considers both how ticklingly absurd our asylum processes are, and why they exist to begin with. Asylum: from the Ancient Greek asulon, meaning refuge. What does it mean, Limbo asks, to seek a port in a storm? What does it mean to offer one? As the hostile environment continues to bed down its grasping roots, can we even say, anymore, that that is what we do?

So, to recap, here’s our Top 20 to 3…

#20 – After Love
#19 – Undine
#18 – No Time To Die
#17 – Ninjababy
#16 – The French Dispatch
#15 – Shiva Baby
#14 – Dune
#13 – Drive My Car
#12 – Annette
#11 – Minari
#10 – Sound of Metal
#9 – Spencer
#8 – First Cow
#7 – C’mon C’mon
#6 – Nomadland
#5 – The Power of the Dog
#4 – Another Round
#3 – Limbo

Stay tuned for the remainder of 2021 as we count down our Top 10 films of 2021!