‘Limbo’: Cannes-Selected Film Tackles the Immigrant Experience in Dryly Deadpan Fashion [Review]

“Limbo,” which was stamped with Cannes 2020 label last Spring, is a wry observational dramedy about the refugee experience. Set on a fictional remote Scottish island, where a group of new arrivals await the results of their asylum claims, writer-director Ben Sharrock’s oddity of a film is the epitome of purposeful tedium.

Centering on Omar (Amir El-Masry), a young Syrian musician who carries his grandfather’s oud, a traditional middle eastern guitar, everywhere he goes, “Limbo” riskingly decides to depict the dreary monotony of this young man’s life, amidst the grey-skied locale. Omar has almost nothing to do in this film but to wait for an answer about his asylum request.

And so, there are a lot of shots here of Omar just waiting, solemnly wandering around town like a Lin invisible drifter, as he takes lessons in Western customs and talks on the phone to his parents in Turkey. The unattractive Scottish landscapes are here to emphasize the mundanity of Omar’s experience and, sure enough, we’re there to experience it with him.

Sharrock emphasizes his cinematic eye on stagnant framing, lots of it, to the point where he sucks out any of the artifice that usually comes in films tackling the “immigrant experience.” Of course, just because a movie character is stuck in limbo doesn't mean viewers should go through the same thing, but that’s what happens here and it’ll be what polarizes many.

Sharrock‘s attempts at dry deadpan humour work quite well — wait until you see two asylum-seeking men from Senegal arguing over an episode of “Friends”that lthey just saw in their tiny little shack of an apartment (“they were on a break!”). The film’s second half goes into darker, more serious territory, enforcing the themes in Sharrock’s film, but it all feels rather forced and falls flat at the most inopportune of times. Omar suffers from crushingly dull survival guilt throughout, but that doesn’t mean we have to as well.

SCORE: B-