The BRWC Review: Limbo

20th June 2017

By Orla Smith.

From the very first frames of Limbo, director Will Blank asks you to look closer.

He holds on the sky just long enough for you to notice the shape of the clouds. His camera creeps towards a chipped billboard bearing the image of an old painting. The nearer we get, the more shapes emerge from the writhing mess of brown and grey paints.

With nothing but images of a desolate desert and the kind of art that could only have been created before any of us were born, you might think that Limbo is set in another time. That illusion is shattered when a mobile phone crashes against that billboard, cutting through the agitated sound of wind that soundtracks the film’s opening minute.

At only eight minutes, Limbo doesn’t feel clipped. It flows at its own strange pace, gracefully shifting in style and direction. The presence of that mobile phone feels like an intrusion, but it’s nothing compared to the jarring effect of hearing the film’s lead actor Raúl Castillo speak for the first time. His gravelly voice – reminiscent of Adam Driver’s – is a jolt, as a human presence takes over from the dominance of nature. He’s soon dwarfed by it again, as the camera pulls back and replaces him as a small and aimless figure against the enormity of the plains that stretch endlessly around him.

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Voiceover is used liberally, less as exposition and more to verbalise the stray thoughts of our protagonist, who remains nameless. The words we hear feel in line with a thought bubble in a comic strip – it was adapted from one, written by Marian Churchland. We follow the protagonist’s train of thought as it wanders to and fro, occasionally allowing us glimpses of what has led him here and what he has left behind.

The title Limbo might lead you to believe that he is stuck in an uncertain space between life and death, but upon further consideration of the film, it feels as if it is evoking a kind of limbo that may be more familiar to the living people watching it. We never find out the contents of the text message that compelled the protagonist to drive away from his life and hurl his phone away in spite, but there’s no doubt that it contained the kind of information that sent him skewing off onto a different path. We’re afforded glimpses of the girlfriend he has left behind. If this is the story of the end of a relationship, his limbo is more akin to the one we all experience when looking for a way to move from one chapter of our lives to the next.

But the film has a final trick up its sleeve, in the form of a large, dying dog whose design contains just enough wise mysticism to make it easier to buy when he starts to speak, in the voice of Sam Elliott no less. The communication between the human and the dog is telepathic, but there’s enough expressiveness in the slow heaving of the dog’s struggling form to make sure there’s no doubt that this voice is connected to that body.

Limbo manages to be so expressive because it has the directorial confidence to focus on its most crucial details with microscopic scrutiny.

The sound design is masterful, zeroing in on tiny moments, like the folding of a burrito, or the slow opening of a heavy eyelid. Our protagonist remembers sitting in the kitchen, thinking about food and recalling the image of a teabag slowly seeping into water. All the while, his girlfriend wanders around the periphery of the frame.

It’s the loss of her that he laments, yet he can only think of times when she was there and he ignored her. It’s a film about regret and moving on, and maybe more still that I haven’t yet been able to parse from its flurry of sound and images. This one’s a thinker, worth experiencing and discussing, and worth letting live in your head for a while.

Limbo has the release date of 27th June 27.

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