Between monster and human: this makes Gräns a masterpiece

The wonderful new Swedish film Gräns is a modern fairytale in which the atrocities of man come to the fore. As an appropriate response to all cruelty, revenge would be a real possibility. But would you go for revenge if your own inhumanity is then a fact?

This post contains a less important spoiler that says nothing about what is really going on in the story.

Humanity and cruelty. A difficult issue

If you read the papers, you have to agree with Vore: people are "disgusting, depraved creatures, parasites that erase everything on earth." And yet, you think, it is not that bad either. After all, in most people there is enough goodness to be found. Even then, Vore would say, every day you see inexpressible acts in the news perpetrated by beings that look like humans.

A difficult issue. Perhaps that is the whole point of what Vore says: how do you rhyme humanity with cruelty?

Take child pornography. No crime can be worse. Anyone who has ever seen such images is in danger of losing all trust in people. And to join Vore. It is precisely in Vore's story - the film Gräns by the Iranian-Swedish director Ali Abbasi - that child pornography plays an important role.

The film does not start with him, but with Tina, a woman with a special appearance. You can fairly say she is ugly. She has wild hair, a big nose, a thick forehead and prominent, protruding teeth with sharp edges.

Tina works as a customs policeman on the border between Sweden and Denmark where ferries arrive every day. Her job is to detect smuggling activities, something she is frightfully good at thanks to her empathic sense of smell. She is able to smell what people feel: emotions such as fear or shame.

One day she picks out a passenger who has a memory card with child pornography on his phone.

A little later she meets Vore, a man who, remarkably, has exactly the same facial features as she does. She immediately smells that there is something not right, but when her colleagues search his bag, they find nothing illegal. He carries, however, some foreign objects with him, including a homemade device with which he breeds worms or maggots.

Because Tina feels that Vore is special, that he is like her, she invites him to live in the guest house near her house in the forest. There she discovers that they have more in common, especially a strange bond with nature: both can communicate with animals.

The story becomes even more intriguing when Tina helps the police to roll up a child pornography network (the result of the arrest of the man with the memory card). Then it turns out that Vore is involved in this case. Faced with this situation, Tina has a decision to make. Her feeling for Vore is undeniably real, but her moral compass is meticulous. How should she react to the revelations? As a human?

There is no black and white in the world

The Gräns story is full of surprises. That Tina and Vore are different from ordinary people, because of their special physical characteristics, is clear to those who look at the poster of the film. I do not tell you what exactly this means. The point is that they, because of their otherness, offer all of us the mirror to our own humanity. "People are afraid of us," Vore says to Tina, "they know that there will be revenge."

With this he outlines his hatred for the people. And who is proving him wrong? People are depraved (see the phenomenon of child pornography). They are parasites that destroy everything that is pure and innocent. And yet, for Tina it is difficult to join him in his reactionary thinking. Revenge? Is that an option?

This story confronts us with the contrast between innocence and corruption. And with the complexity of the clash between these two poles. Even in nature, where Vore and Tina find ultimate freedom by swimming in the river or running naked between green trees, there is also depravity. And in the human world you can indeed find innocence and integrity: the police investigation by honest agents, for example, leads to arrests.

An answer to the question of how we should respond to cruelty (revenge is a real option, according to Vore) does not come, except in the form of Tina, the hideous woman who feels everything, who knows exactly which emotions people have, also the monsters among us. And then says: "I do not understand what cruelty is good for."

What that makes of her, exactly, you can see in the film. Tina is not a human being. Or maybe she is? Maybe she is more human than we are, she is as we should be…