This Swedish film defies convention and expectation on every level. Its genre is billed as fantasy and given that it’s about trolls in modern day Sweden, that’s understandable. Yet it is a deadly serious film, touching on paedophilia and genocide, as well as pride in the characters’, by human standards, very unusual sexuality. It was also made by an Iranian director Ali Abbasi and based on a Swedish short story. It’s easily one of the most original works I’ve seen so far this year.

Tina is a woman who was born with brutish features which she believes is due to chromosomal abnormalities. She works as a Customs officer where her extraordinary nose helps her ferret out smuggled goods. Her nose is also somehow able to detect negative emotions and she uses this ability to help the police crack a ring of makers of child pornography. One day a man passes through the customs checkpoint with similar features as her own, carrying maggots. After he passes through a second time, they get to know one another. He calls himself Vore and has numerous physical abnormalities including the presence of a vagina despite looking masculine. Tina lets him stay in her guesthouse which annoys her own boyfriend. Vore explains to her that they are not humans but trolls. Tina is initially stupefied but then luxuriates in the realization that she isn’t alone and embraces her new identity. Yet this too has a dark side as Vore is angry at the humans for what they have done to trolls and seeks vengeance.

This is really quite an astounding film. It looks and feels like a serious, independent European film but its subject matter is something you might expect to see in an episode of The Outer Limits or something. The really fantastic thing that it isn’t afraid to go all the way and compromises on nothing. The scene where Tina discovers sexuality for the first time, having suppressed herself her whole life due to being taught that she was born deformed, is simply magical. A lesser director might have made a scene that involves weird genitalia disgusting or at best tacky, but Abbasi succeeds in making it intense and uplifting. It works great as a way to transpose old myths of trolls and fairies into a modern setting and as a different view of how we denigrate and destroy otherness. I can scarcely believe that a film like this exists and I would love to see more fantasy and science-fiction topics to be treated with the kind of seriousness we see here.

Great as it is, this story also serves as an example that horror writers like John Ajvide Lindqvist whose story this film is based on approach worldbuilding very differently from science-fiction writers. This portrayal delights in drawing on old myths and stories to adapt them into a modern setting and maximize the horror value. Yet like all horror stories, it relies on the fantastical elements being a mystery to society. But this contradicts the established facts in here that trolls have been studied by humans. It doesn’t make sense that the government doesn’t know about them and plan accordingly. Incorporating that however would change the tone of the story and dampen the sense of wonder in it.

Anyway I really liked this one and it’s probably not a coincidence that Lindqvist is also the writer whose work was adapted into Let the Right One In. The lead actress Eva Melander is to be commended as well for taking on a role that requires her to look positively hideous and then inject so much passion and even sensuality into it. This is indeed an eye-opening film and there are few films like it.