Ben Sharrock announces himself as a master of atmospheric film-making with this stirring drama about a Syrian migrant
What a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the
British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping. Despite an elegant deadpan style established from the outset, Sharrock soon gets you to invest in the characters and care deeply about what happens to them. Limbo is about refugees and asylum seekers in
Britain, and it’s a bracingly internationalist and non-parochial piece of work: film-making with a bold view on the world but also as gentle and intimate as a much-loved sitcom. It reminded me at various moments of Aki Kaurismäki or Elia Suleiman or Bill Forsyth, with a distinct touch of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail And I.
The setting is an impossibly bleak and starkly beautiful Scottish island, fictional and mostly deserted, almost resembling a stage-set for Waiting For Godot (but filmed partly on Uist in the Outer Hebrides). Here a number of refugees from
Syria and elsewhere – single men with no families – have been relocated in grimly functional hostels with a bare-minimum subsistence allowance. Forbidden to do any paid work, they must simply wait for the official word on whether they can stay. And as the narrator says at the beginning of Casablanca: they wait … and wait … and wait. The situation is taken broadly from real life.